Error trapping in AppBasic

I wonder how easy it would be for the OS to interpret EOF as newline in message files.

AppBasic seems to be a step in the right direction, but many new things could be included inside it to make things become even easier to use.

First, AppBasic is written in BASIC and in comparison to C or Assembler it is slower and lengthier, even when crunched.

If you also write special things into AppBasic you break the idea of the Toolbox as a universal interface programmable in any language. I have found some things I wanted to do with the Toolbox that were not available and have ended up adding to the OOP interface within Basalt itself. An example is a ‘Hidden’ attribute for gadgets. This is guilty of the offence above, even though I have a perfectly serviceable BASIC function to do it. ;-)

Without the present aptitude for writing new gadgets in the official way I nevertheless know I could within Basalt itself, but refrain from doing so.

For example, on a change to ‘writablebox’ I can call the function VAT: writablebox2.text=writable.box.text*1,20

That is quite sophisticated. I do not think we should try to make BBC BASIC what it is not. Perhaps there are other languages – cue Gavin. ;-)

Using Basalt you would have to do something like:

AppBasic is not so far from this. There are just a few limits and things that are not ‘simplified’ as it could be.
Of course, the best would be to extend functionalities (as I suggested) with toolbox gadgets, not AppBasic.
The idea is to say that the more we can do with toolbox, the less we’ll have to deal with many different interfaces.