I'm really enjoying #FastBasic on #atari8bit! It feels much more modern* than other languages on the platform, and the native IDE booting from BW-DOS has just enough utility to make it viable to write code on an Atari 800 or equivalent. (I miss vi's 'join' and a search and replace utility, but the edit/save/run cycle feels very natural.)

FastBasic's author is active on #AtariAge, and has also contributed to the recent 1.5 release of BW-DOS, in conjunction with Jiří Bernášek, the original author of BW-DOS.

It's extraordinary; the #retrocomputing scene is more lively and robust than ever, between new hardware add-ons and new programming languages.

• Well, 1970s structured programming modern; in FastBasic, there's no scoping of variables, nor functions that return values, nor hand-holding error messages. Lots of great utility in the several looping constructs and 16-bit DPOKE and DPEEK, and the recent addition of #FujiNet commands is intriguing, on top of the existing #XIO support.

#structuredProgramming #BWDOS

Nice bug here in the interaction between BW-DOS and FastBasic! I've managed to save a file with no name.

I'm about to mount this ATR using atrfs to find out what went wrong there. I must have specified the file path incorrectly while saving from FastBasic. D3:>MYFB.BAS doesn't seem to be valid, even though all the saving sounds are made, and no error occurs.

#atari8bit #FastBasic #BWDOS