on
November 27th 2006 at 2:17 pm in General Recently I was browsing through this sites’ statistics and noticed a link from this fellow who discovered my basic interpreter-project after reading the Salon article ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code‘. An article that, by the way, makes a very solid point.
So that, combined with realising that I haven’t done anything with my BASIC interpreter for almost 6 months, made me decide last weekend to tinker around with Mozilla’s XUL in an attempt to XULify the interpreter so it can be run, for instance, from Firefox’s Tools menu.
The 0.2.16 version is the first attempt.
Graphics are still supported as are file-operations (although for SAVE you still need a password). Just like the web-version, these file-operations still go through this web-site so doing a RUN MENU should not only print a menu, but the options should function, too. 
It ought to work with Firefox 1.5 up until the latest 2.0 series, and is basically platform independent as it is all written in Javascript. And of course, might you run into some problems running this — let me know.
Oh before I forget:
Big fat disclaimer It is not a stable software-product and I am in no way responsible for browser crashes or whatever seems to have been caused by installing the extension.
You can download the extension here, or get it from the NG-BASIC page.
Have fun…
(By the way, the other version I once started to work on, the one with mouse-support and paged screens is in the fridge for a while because it functioned waaaaay too slow anyways. I noticed it’s even broken now.)
PS: I just noticed the funny coincidence that, if I can trust the date I placed in the file-header when I started it, that NG-BASIC is exactly 1 year old, tomorrow. Yay.
OK there’s a 0.2.18 version available that fixes the rendering bug that manifested itself as a border around the text on the screen.
Also, the updateURL in the install.rdf has been set, so it can automatically detect whether there is a new version of the interpreter.
So that’s cool.