Those other countries can kiss my White privileged ascii. If it's so important to them, why don't they ban together and make Third-World-BASIC? We could do our part by donating _MAPTRIANGLE, so they could auto-cad their mud hut villages. Oh wait, did someone mention Italy in this thread? Yes! Well, that makes this a whole different story. The Development should jump on this immediatamente!
In all seriousness, I have been bitten in HTML coding by some of those Italian Unicode characters. I use QB64 to sort them out, when parsing those pages. So kidding aside, certainly it would be nice to be as universal as possible, but to what degree of effort? What about Mandarin characters or more diversely put CJK? Do we have that working yet in QB64?
Also, forgive my spoof on the "arrogance" issue. As a hobby language, the few people who contribute to the advancement of QB64 have to pick and choose the most beneficial additions to the platform. For instance, would it be better to make more programming features or try to make the language more universal? Certainly if we had developers from China, Japan, and other countries working on the project, things might be different. Certainly if we had millions of users world wide, the same would apply. Frankly it's amazing to me the project is as universal as it is, but it's like my mamma always used to say, "It's always something!"
Good night my little Roseanne Roseannadanna,
Pete
Hi Pete,
Thanks for your fun post.
I have always appreciated your humor and as a Frenchman, I do not feel at all insulted by your message which makes me laugh.
However, let me tell you that I fundamentally disagree with one important point:
If you are rightly saying that there are not enough developers contributing to the development of QB64, one of the main reasons is that even today, this surprising language is nothing but a hobbyist project.
Why ? Precisely because there are too many limitations in its code to make it evolve easily.
Now, if integrating vWATCH64 into the IDE seems like a very good idea to me, for QB64 to become a world-class tool for example to be accepted by the Raspberry foundation, I think the following steps must be taken:
1- separation of the IDE code from that of the compiler so that the latter can finally behave really like any other classic compiler (example gcc). This would allow, among other things, to see developers concentrate on the evolution of the language itself, and other to take care of the IDE. Some time ago, Fellippe told me that this should not pose a big problem. And that would also make it possible to interface with other IDEs easily.
2- extracting all the "messages" from the IDE code and setting up these messages in external files. This would make it very easy to create multiple translations in different languages. In addition, it is so easy to do and does not pose any technical problem. This also makes it possible to offer a dynamic change of language. Cf above for developpers wanting to contribute to the project when only translating the messages.
3- Unicode support and in any case at least no more default setting in code page 437. Indeed, as said above if the extended character table of IBM and Microsoft was "European biased", the reason and that this choice was not binding for English-speaking developers but simultaneously opened their tools to all European developers who alone represent a much larger market than that of the USA.
4- that vWATCH can work with programs placed in subdirectories and also with large programs (see my post:
https://www.qb64.org/forum/index.php?topic=4123.msg134750#msg134750 )
There are surely other points to be addressed but these first 4 seem to me really essential for QB64 to acquire a real place on the worldwide market to gain millions of users (and developpers).
And adapting QB64, InForm, and vWATCH64 for use on Raspberry 4 seems like a great way to get there ... except to let Google and Microsoft take their place once again.
BTW, your telling about the number of contributors is the story of the snake that dies its tail.
Cheers.
Fifi
