What's new in Microsoft Small Basic 0.9
Jun 15, 2010
- Firstly, the Small Basic compiler and runtime have been overhauled and the result is a big performance gain. Some tight loop programs run up to 4 times faster than the previous versions. This has been the primary focus of the release.
- Next, we have new additions to the library.
- - We now have a Controls object that allows you to add Buttons and TextBoxes and react to click and text change events.
- - The Shapes object adds support for adding/modifying, animating and zooming text. This is extremely useful for displaying and updating text frequently, like the score in a game.
- - The Sound object now has a new operation, PlayMusic, which plays music described by a subset of Music Markup Language supported by QBasic. An example is: Sound.PlayMusic("O5 C8 C8 G8 G8 A8 A8 G4 F8 F8 E8 E8 D8 D8 C4")
- And then, there are the bug fixes. I won’t go into the details but there are a ton of fixes. An important update is the change in the default extension for Small Basic documents. Small Basic documents get a default extension of “.smallbasic” instead of “.sb” to avoid conflicts with MIT’s Scratch.
- Last, but certainly not the least, is the support for right-to-left languages and the first localized language in that series is Arabic. Also included are Dutch and Polish versions, bringing the count of supported languages to 15!