I don't necessarily mean to suggest XBasic, although I think it would be more than capable of handling the task. And I could help with the learning curve some since I already know it. But there's also C, and maybe some other languages as well.

As for free, even C is free, it's just a matter of finding an editor/compiler/debugger that is free.

Anyway, XBasic is dead only in the sense that there hasn't been much new development. There was talk about adding a bunch of stuff, 64 bit, unicode support, perhaps multithreading, compile to C... but... just didn't happen. There is an unofficial branch mostly to maintain linux compatibility (major change in the linux kernel some years back broke a bunch of stuff), but I've not used that branch as I only use Windows. There was also the Windows only offshoot XBLite which had a good start, but seems to have really died.

Even though XB's last stable official release is over ten years old it's still very powerful and capable, as you've seen from some of the demo's I've sent you. It's far faster than both Perl and TB.

The yahoo support group is still alive. Low activity, but when a question is posed it's answered quickly. I read daily, and participate on occasion.

And, even though there hasn't been any official development, the source code is open and you can make modifications of your own. I myself have pulled code from the source and modified it for my own needs. The beauty is that the source code is written in XB, so once you learn to program in XB you can modify it. It would be like being able to modify the Perl (or TB) compiler yourself if it was written in Perl (or TB).

And for advanced users, if there is a C library that does what you need, XB can import them (sometimes takes a little work, depends). I've done it (an image editing library).

some advantages of XBasic over TB/Perl:

> compiles to assembly/machine code, which will run much faster than those run-time interpreted language
> can run programs from editor/debugger without compiling to EXE, and they still run just as fast (some slowdown but is unnoticeable), (I myself rarely compile).
> memory limited only by what you have (since it's 32 bit, it's limited only by the Windows OS to 2 gigs (want a 9 dimension array of 1 million elements each? It can do it)
> can write GUI programs
> graphics (pretty much an advanced set of the typical basic graphics)
> functions - programs can be broken into functions for a cleaner easier to edit design rather than one giant monolithic block of code (actually, you are kind of forced to use functions, but with good reason and good results)

some disadvantages (learning challenges, really):

> learning curve. XB is highly structured, strongly typed, and CASE SENSITIVE, which takes some getting used to (even I had fun with that)
> only single threaded (one core), 32 bit (but good enough for everything I've thrown at it so far)
> user input (such as keyboard) handled very differently (no INKEY$)
> graphics is a little more involved to get started, since it IS a window
> GUI programs do have a big learning curve, but that's not a fault of XB but rather the nature of GUI programs in general, would have the same challenge in any language
> XB uses it's own internal library to make GUI windows, so they don't look exactly like other windows programs
> some things act more unix like than windows like (XB was originally written on UNIX)

> no "introduction for beginners" manual - this would probably be the most frustrating part. There are plenty of reference docs, but not much in the way of step-by-step tutorials. There are example programs, but its up to you to read the code to figure out how it works. Personally this was my biggest frustration. You kinda have to just jump in and learn to swim while in the deep end. This is probably where I can help the most.

I'm sure I could think of more... but this should suffice for the moment.

Brian