IBasic Pro user. Should I upgrade to Emergence?

[carpman2007]

Hi everyone,

I'm a registered user of IBasic Professional.  I purchased it about a year ago, but I've noticed that there appears to be problems with the forums on Pyxia's website, and as I understand it, the developer has started a new company and re-released the product as Emergence Basic.

Should I let go of IBasic and upgrade to Emergence?  Would it be improper to come here with IBasic questions?

Thanks for your input!

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

IBasic is a dead product.  The site and languages was sold in 2005 to a buyer that subsequently abandoned the product and hasn't been heard from in a long time.  The site is automated and will probably continue to run, as a ghost, for a long time come. But you won;t be getting any support from the current owner.

With that said Emergence BASIC is a new product, designed by Ionic Wind Software to be almost 99% compatibe with IBasic syntax.  It has an active user base, support from this site, and many updates to come over the next year.

Paul. 

[Rod]

I was also an IBasic Pro user, having purchased it just months before the company was sold.

When Paul released Emergence Basic, I joyfully bought it as fast as I could point-and-click my way to the order screen. Part of that was its compatibility with IBasic Pro, part of that was my need for something with a lesser learning curve than Aurora, but (to put it bluntly) most of it was Paul. If Paul were to release a Cobol compiler, I'd buy it!!!

My recommendation is to un-install IBasic Pro (free up the disk space), and get Emergence Basic just as fast as you can.

You can KNOW you will be supported, and that the product won't go stale.

Welcome to the community!!!

[Kale]

part of that was my need for something with a lesser learning curve than Aurora

You do realise that Aurora's learning curve is roughly the same as Javascript! It's really not that difficult.

[carpman2007]

Thank you all for your advice.  I think I probably will purchase Emergence.

[Rod]

Gary: You're right about the learning curve, but I've got so much going on in the non-programming world there's just no time (or energy) left to devote to it right now. I keep hoping for a break, but life keeps piling it on.

Another advantage, I believe, is that in knowing Paul's Basic languages, there will be some crossover into the Aurora syntax.

[paravantis]

Carpman2007,

A very important issue you should consider in deciding to upgrade to eBasic is that a small number of important bugs have been ironed out.

In one such case (that was of great importance to me because I write badly structured, long spaghetti programs) far jumps were handled incorrectly by the assembler behind eBasic and this resulted in the code freezing; in another case, string operations could cause memory problems and the code, similarly bombed.

Both of these have been the subject of extensive discussion in relatively recent forum threads and Paul, in both cases, released new versions of eBasic!

Therefore it is, in my opinion, imperative that you upgrade to eBasic (the cost of which is very low anyways).

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Also Emergence has a much better debugger.  As of 1.58 you can display the contents of variables while single stepping.  It also has a built in disassembler.  IBasic Pro only had register displays.