I downloaded the XBasic documentation and went through it.

The impression that I have is that XBasic is another of the endless list of dinosaur programming languages. It can’t read key presses – you have to hit the Enter key before it will recognize a key press. It probably can’t send information to Windows as if it were typed on the keyboard. It probably can’t be used with a Windows “Pipe.”

It is no longer being developed. The documentation is a decade old. It does not have a Newsgroup. And there are almost no recent entries in the Yahoo XBasic bulletin board.

Does anyone know how Python compares with XBasic for calculation speed? If they are comparable then I would suggest that programming efforts might want to move in the direction of Python. It is a highly supported, active language that is also a free download.

However, if people want to use XBasic then that is fine with me. I have a Perl program that can read key presses and also send information to Windows as if it were typed into the keyboard. It works with other programs like this. (Actually, the handshaking routine is a little more complex than what is described here. But this should be adequate.)

Perl checks for a key press 10 times a second. If a key is pressed it immediately stores that information in a data file. The other program such as XBasic that is also running checks that file for new entries 10 times a second. If it sees a new entry it immediately acts on the data.

Perl also checks another file 10 times a second to see if the XBasic program, or whatever, has stored any information there that it wants Perl to act on or to pass along to Windows.

If people want to try using XBasic then the first project might be to try to get it to do interactive graphics. In response to key press information sent to it by Perl the XBasic program would draw and make changes to charts etc.

If that worked I would probably shift to using XBasic program to do my Earthquake Forecasting Program graphics instead of using Gnuplot. However, I am not going to do that unless some other people want to participate in the effort so that I don’t have to do all of the programming work myself.