A Quick and Painless Introduction

Written by Elmar Vogt, Fürth, GERMANY

This chapter is designed to give you an overview over SmallBASIC and lets you determine whether the language suits your needs.

Two Words of Caution

• This booklet is about the SmallBASIC programming language – it’s not an introduction to programming in general. While not a lot of software background is expected from the reader, it is assumed that common programming concepts are already understood.¹ Some knowledge in programming languages like _C, Pascal, or Ruby is useful.

• SmallBASIC is a language with a long and varied history. Some features which are still present in its code are no longer actively supported. These deprecated features may be removed in future releases, and, to keep the Vademecum concise, they will not be dealt with in this document.

Features, or: Is it for me?

SmallBASIC started life as something like an _{extended handheld calculator}, designed for PIMs² running the Palm OS. One release note read, It’s not meant to be a full-fledged programming language, and it will never be. Please don’t ask us to turn it into one.

Some time has gone by since, and Nicholas Christopoulos and Chris Warren-Smith, the driving forces behind the project, have developed SmallBASIC into a dialect of the BASIC language which is neither _small (in the sense of it’s capabilities), nor does it share too much with classic BASIC dialects.³

Today, some of SmallBASIC’s features are:

• SmallBASIC is a multi-platform BASIC language: Currently, Linux, Windows and Android are supported.⁴

• The language is pretty compact: The Debian installer for Linux, for example, comes as a single file with ca. 600 kb.

• SmallBASIC features a very comprehensive set of mathematical functions.

• It is an interpreted language with no compilation runs required.

• SmallBASIC supports structured programming, user-defined structures and modularized source files. It is not object-oriented, though.

• It also shows much leeway in questions of syntax: For many commands, there are alternatives, and for many constructs, there are different synonyms available.

• SmallBASIC comes with its own little IDE.

• Graphics primitives (like lines, circles, etc.) are provided, as well as sound and simple GUI functions.

Resources

Here you will find a few internet resources that might be helpful for you when you want to get more closely acquainted with :

• http://smallbasic.github.io is the central hub for information about SmallBASIC in general – a good starting point for a user of SmallBASIC. It leads you to the download of the current SmallBASIC versions and provides a lot of background information.

• https://github.com/smallbasic/SmallBASIC hosts the source code and cutting-edge SmallBASIC releases – most interesting if you want to contribute to the further development of SmallBASIC.

• You can get directly in touch with the developing team of SmallBASIC through e-mail.

Licenses

• SmallBASIC is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)

• This document, the _Vademecum, is released under the Creative Commons License by-nc-nd. In short, this license means that you are free to reproduce and distribute this document in any non-commercial manner, as long as you don’t change the author’s name (that’s mine), and as long as the contents remain unchanged.