Looking for simple BASIC IDE

[mckeek]

Hey Geniuses,

I am teaching a high school BASIC unit next semester and am looking for a simple BASIC IDE which will work in both a Windoze and OSX environment. The idea is that students can download and install it at home, so it must be free and easy to install and use. I checked out Extreme Basic but it required me to install Developer Tools, so that's out. Anybody have any other suggestions?

My dream is VisualBasic Express for OSX, like THAT will ever happen...:D

TIA,

Kevin

[Grover]

There don't seem to be a lot of options. Maybe this is helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects_by_platform#Apple_Macintosh

It will not pass the simplicity test by a long shot and would be for Visual Basic .NET but if you get stuck and free is more important than simple you could try MonoDevelop:

http://www.monodevelop.com/Main_Page

It can be built for both Windows and OS X although the OS X instructions will be far beyond the capability of students learning basic and it looks from the screenshots like they'll need X11 installed (along with Mono.) Maybe you could build the packages and distribute an installer.

Another not-so-elegant solution would be to pick an IDE that will run on Linux and have your students run it in a virtual environment for instance using Q and QEMU. You could distribute virtual machines with everything pre-configured.

[steelphantom]

Realbasic (http://www.realsoftware.com/) is pretty good, but it's pretty expensive at $70.00 per license.

[Eraserhead]

I checked out Extreme Basic but it required me to install Developer Tools, so that's out. Anybody have any other suggestions?

You normally need the developer tools for programming, why not just install them (they are free after all)? They hide away in /Developer so normal users don't even need to know that they are there.

[Kunimodi]

Hey Geniuses,

I am teaching a high school BASIC unit next semester and am looking for a simple BASIC IDE which will work in both a Windoze and OSX environment. The idea is that students can download and install it at home, so it must be free and easy to install and use. I checked out Extreme Basic but it required me to install Developer Tools, so that's out. Anybody have any other suggestions?

My dream is VisualBasic Express for OSX, like THAT will ever happen...:D

TIA,

Kevin

RealBasic may be what you want. However, VisualBasic.NET is pretty good (particularly compared to VB6 and earlier) and powerful. Eventually you will be able to use it well with OS X through mono, but right now VB support is very much in development. If you want an old style Dartmouth basic with line numbers and all, Chipmunk basic exists.

[ITASOR]

You can download DOSBOX and run Microsoft QBASIC in it either on OS X (PPC or Intel), or Windows.