[Gambas-user] About help and arrays and variables

[Benoît Minisini]

> On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Werner <wdahn at ...1000...> wrote:
> > On 20/11/10 04:40, Zelimir Ikovic wrote:
> >> I am following discussion on Gambas more than 3 months.
> >> 
> >> Last 10 years I worked in VB6 (70%) and C(30%) on Windows.
> >> 
> >> I am about to switch to Linux, and I have to decide:
> >> Gambas3, FreePascal (fpGUI or Lazarus) or C, C++ and FLTK
> >> I am just wondering is there any discussion on this topic, and where.
> >> 
> >> How do you compare Gambas against those tools
> 
> Gambas is the smoothest transition from VB in terms of language
> syntax, the differences are usually
> thngs most VB programmers would acknowledge as defects in the original
> language, such as 1-based arrays,
> overloading ( ) to deference arrays.
> However Gambas is Linux-only, the advantage of FreePascal and C++ is
> you can port back to Windows.
> The Gambas IDE is easier to use and more stable IMHO.
> 
> Of the three languages (C++, Pascal, Gambas), Gambas is the most
> high-level. It is fully OOP but lacks the "protected" access level
> (personally I hardly used it in C++ and don't miss it)
> The only things I really miss are function pointers ("procedural
> variables" in Pascal) and a proper heredoc syntax.

In Gambas 3, you have support for callbacks. That means you can send a Gambas 
function to a extern C function, and the extern C function will use it 
(almost) transparently!

As for "heredoc" syntax, I don't know what that word means.

> 
> Gambas is interpreted, the other 2 are compiled, so it's slower, but
> in practice I haven't found this an
> issue (it's heaps faster than Java, and even Ruby, probably on par with
> Python)
> 
> Ian
> 

I made a few comparison tests with Python, and Gambas is a little bit faster 
in stupid benchmarks (loops + arithmetic computation). I think it should be 
faster when calling methods inside components written in C/C++ too.

Of course, it is slower than compiled and JIT interpreted languages. But I 
guess it uses less memory and is faster to start.

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini