ARMbasic and Visual
BASIC have different goals. Visual BASIC is a general purpose language
that includes access to various elements of Microsoft Windows and
its application programs.
ARMbasic is a small language
aimed at controlling hardware with some communication abilities with host
systems. Wherever practical
ARMbasic is a proper
subset of Visual BASIC. Some elements of earlier BASICs do not apply to
Visual BASIC, but still do in ARMbasic. These elements include keywords
such as RUN and CLEAR.
- Visual BASIC has a rich set of data types as well as some object oriented
extensions.
- In ARMbasic the default data type is 32 bits (SIGNED INTEGER), and also supports
arrays of SIGNED INTEGERS and STRINGs.
- FOR..NEXT is ambiguous for negative STEP. To clarify negative steps use
DOWNTO.
- One goal of ARMbasic is to be a simple, easy to use
language, but still be a powerful tool for controlling hardware. For
this reason a simple subset of BASIC has been chosen, with extensions for hardware control.
- Only single dimension arrays are supported.
-
This
is a very powerful tool available to C programmers, but not available in many BASICs
- The C-preprocessor (CPP) has been integrated into BASICtools
