copyright 1988-1999
June 1, 1999
The XBasic documentation in the following pages is fairly complete and reasonably accurate, but it is old. Except for minor touchups, most of thisdocumentation was written when XBasic was originally designed and implemented, which was1988 - 5 & 7 years before WindowsNT & Windows95 were first released.
XBasic was designed and developed by Max Reason to be portable between UNIX and whatever 32-bit operating system became popular for PCs - which ended up being Windows95/98/NT and Linux. The first implementation of XBasic was developed on a Motorola 88000 RISC CPU workstation running UNIX in 1988, then on 80386+ UNIX in 1991-1992, then on WindowsNT & Windows95 during alpha developer pre-release in 1992 & 1994, and finally on Linux in 1995.
XBasic became Open Source in early 2000 and the new head-maintainer became Eddie Penninkhof. Since that date two different distributions of XBasic have been available, with minor differences. There are also minor differences between the Windows and Linux versions of each, but these are invisible to the user. Compiled .EXE files are not portable between Windows and Linux, but the source code is. It is entirely feasible to develop a program under Linux and run it under Windows or vice versa.
Because this documentation is sooooo old, please expect and forgive the out-of-date comments you see, especially in this overview. Always remember this documentation was written years before WindowsNT or VisualBasic existed, and was most recently modified just after the original version of VisualBasic.
This documentation was converted from the original XBasic documentation by a kind XBasic programmer. You can download this whole set of HTML documents in a single ZIP format file and install them on your own computer. Thenyou can read and view them without an active internet connection. Make sure you specify the target directory as the root directory / of whatever hard-drive contains your /xb directory, and enable recreate directories if asked - the documentation should end up in directory /xb/html.
Return to this web-page occasionally to see if newer documentation is available. This is version 4.001.
This is "living documentation" that all XBasic programmers should correct and improve for the sake of all. Whenever you find errors or weaknesses in this documentation - FIX, IMPROVE, ENHANCE, EXTEND. You can edit the HTML for any page or create new pages or whole documents and suggest where they belong in the documentation set. Submit your work to the Xbasic mailing list for quick review and probable merge into the master document that will hopefully always be available to everyone on-line, and probably also included in the \xb\html directory of the XBasic freeware package.
See the XBasic links pages at www.xbasic.org or xbasic.sourceforge.net for links to the latest releases of XBasic for Windows and XBasic for Linux. Enjoy.
Max Reason, Original author of XBasic.