GFA Basic: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:34, 17 January 2016

GFA BASIC is a Basic development system originally developed in 1986 by Frank Ostrowski and then targeting the Atari ST home computer. Reasonably advanced for its time, it quickly gained a lot of popularity on that platform primarily since it had support for generating programs that ran under the ST's GEM GUI, but at the time most basic interpreters available for the system only worked in a CP/M 68k command line mode, but documentation for the CLI mode shipped with the Atari ST development system, but not with the end user systems, leaving many Basic users with development tools but no documentation on how to use them for anything but basic tasks.

The system grew very quickly in its first few years, the language became more structured, it gained a compiler, an IDE and debugging facilities and was ported to the Commodore Amiga where it was almost as much of a success as on the ST.

Interest in the product specifically and in Basic in general had waned over the years and this led to the GFA company going out of business in 2001, no one was interested in taking over development of the system but it has left a legacy with a number of products that are either partially compatible or follow the same model. A number of European Basic variants currently being developed follow much of the GFA Basic syntax and structure some even offer a bit of backward compatibility with GFA BAsic, have the same tendency for keyword proliferation and like the GFA offer enough platform abstraction to make porting between systems painless.

Versions

Last known OS/2 version: 1.0

Links

Unofficial GFA Basic 32 website - Has updated versions of the Windows 32 bit development system for download.
A very low volume Unofficial GFA Basic 32 forum
GFA 16 bit site - Has info and downloads for the DOS and 16 Windows versions including a dBase database tool for Windows.

Author & publisher

Frank Ostrowski
Gesellschaft für Automatisierung (GFA)

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 GFA BASIC is a [[Basic]] development system originally developed in 1986 by Frank Ostrowski and then targeting the [[Atari ST]] home computer. Reasonably advanced for its time, it quickly gained a lot of popularity on that platform primarily since it had support for generating programs that ran under the ST's [[GEM]] GUI, but at the time most basic interpreters available for the system only worked in a [[CP/M 68k]] command line mode, but documentation for the CLI mode shipped with the Atari ST development system, but not with the end user systems, leaving many Basic users with development tools but no documentation on how to use them for anything but basic tasks.
-The system grew very quickly in its first few years, it gained a [[compiler]], an IDE and debugging factilities and was ported to the [[Commodore Amiga]] where it was almost as much of a success as on the ST.
+The system grew very quickly in its first few years, the language became more structured, it gained a [[compiler]], an IDE and debugging facilities and was ported to the [[Commodore Amiga]] where it was almost as much of a success as on the ST.
 Interest in the product specifically and in Basic in general had waned over the years and this led to the GFA company going out of business in 2001, no one was interested in taking over development of the system but it has left a legacy with a number of products that are either partially compatible or follow the same model. A number of European Basic variants currently being developed follow much of the GFA Basic syntax and structure some even offer a bit of backward compatibility with GFA BAsic, have the same tendency for keyword proliferation and like the GFA offer enough platform abstraction to make porting between systems painless.
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 * Last known OS/2 version: 1.0
- - Both versions work under OS/2 BTW
 ==Links==
 * [https://sites.google.com/site/gfabasic322/ Unofficial GFA Basic 32 website] - Has updated versions of the Windows 32 bit development system for download.