A brief History

[o2admin]

O2 was conceived nearly three years ago as a machine script, in essence machine code with a linker. It was an experiment to see how minimal a compilable language could be. Then came the Assembler shortly followed by a macro language. Eros Olmi (of thinBasic) suggested more people would be able to understand it if I added Basic-like syntax. So I thought okay, I'll have this ready in a few weeks. Little did I know how much work was involved in producing a high level compilable language. A compiler has to spend much of its time doing invisible things like automatic type conversion and operator precedence and one is not fully aware of these complexities until you try to encode them.

Even before adding Basic, I had OOP capability in place. I think retrofitting it to a straight procedural language would have been much more difficult which I think is why many Basics have got stuck in their development.

I use the term JIT (Just in Time) compiler to describe Oxygen because it compiles directly to an executable memory image which may be used immediately without first storing it to an EXE file. For programs up to about 40-50k of source code, the compilation time is barely noticeable. This is good for ad-hoc programming where you are not building a static application. The source code is the only item that needs to be stored. Since Oxygen is a single modestly sized DLL it is easy to embed in Applications which require programmability in Basic or a Domain-specific dialect.

Currently O2 compiled executables depend on Oxygen.dll for the run-time library, but I am working on the 'independent' mode where the run-time library is included. This is of course essential when generating 64bit code with a 32 bit compiler.

It will take about three more months to approach Beta quality releases. Much of the testing at this stage involves exposing Oxygen to as many different situations as possible and testing with various APIs.

[edcronos]

Hello
I know I'm just curious here.
but I would like to ask a question
what will be the direction of Oxygen after this new update?
though, I think the first question should be, What is the purpose of Oxygen?
What is the target audience?
What is the concept? independence or compatibility?
I think being independent when writing the routines is not the same as compatibility.
of course it can be a great auxiliary tool, for me it is being mainly for ease of use, but is that all that is sought?
strength the oxygen has, and I see a great passion, especially for its idealizer, Charles Pegge

Sorry, I do not want to be misunderstood.
but I think they are questions that have to be asked to see what direction it will take.
What's lacking for me?
 tutorial and some more examples for those who want to start using.
stability that does not affect older users.
as more participating users appear, we have the attention of experienced users and even collaborators
 
I see a great future in the oxygen, and I would like to contribute something, but unfortunately I am limited both in $ and programming knowledge.
what I will do is post here where I participate examples in use in excel is where I use

[Mike Lobanovsky]

So I thought okay, I'll have this ready in a few weeks.

.......................

It will take about three more months to approach Beta quality releases.

Seven years later and still there, Charles? 

[Charles Pegge]

Well, I decided that rushing the project would be a waste of time and I will refrain from any further attempts at futurology. You never see the whole picture in all its detail.

I think the core language is quite stable now, though there may be some minor additions to macros, which are the key to creating higher-level expressions. I like the diminutive size (141k compressed) which makes it highly distributable, and hope that we can keep it that way, opposing code inflation. I've trimmed off a few surplus features, like inner functions, which turned out to be less useful than anticipated.

I won't make any firm commitments to further documentation and tutorials, but it should be a lot easier when the thing being described does not keep changing.

[edcronos]

thanks for listening
about the changes, I just saw the requests, inclussive in the syntax,
  but I can not talk about it, because although I follow up and just now I ventured to try to use

  Charles Pegge
   I'm going to apologize in advance, so I'll ask, why I do not know how it will be understood after translating

What is your personal interest in Oxygen, as the founder and provider of the project?
What do you dream for Oxygen?

for example, for me the way it is up is enough because my use is limited.
and to everyone who asks, will answer something different.
I could cite several ideas myself,
but if I am not able to help in their implementation, they are of little value, and I do not know if they are implementable.

[Mike Lobanovsky]

@edcronos:

You shouldn't worry so much whether your translated messages are understandable enough. Surprisingly, Google Translate does a pretty good job translating Spanish to English on the fly. I am still in the habit of browsing Latin American VB6 sites regularly placing the respective links directly in the Google Translate text field, and I find the English translations about 98% coherent for my native Russian-speaking self barring minor Spanish typos here and there that Google Translate quite expectedly isn't yet able to correct automatically.

Regretfully, direct English-to-Russian, French-to-Russian or Spanish-to-Russian Google Translate services are much, much poorer to the extent that Russian-only coders can't even grasp the original's main subject let alone its gist or minor details.

[edcronos]

I'm from Brazil, and we have words that have different meanings depending on the context
sometimes I write in the translator and I go back to the Portuguese to see if it is understandable,
and a comma can change a lot, often have to change a few words for the phrase to go to the expected context, "that's what I think happens"
  and the preoccupation with the formal form of writing, something very difficult.

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Ah OK OK, my bad,

My apologies for Spanish, of course it should have been Portuguese instead. 

But even so, the more compliments go to Google Translate for its ability to cope with both these languages equally well.

[edcronos]

really is a tool that breaks down borders
Spanish has a similarity with the Portuguese, for example, although I do not speak Spanish I can read until well, I even read manga in Spanish on an online manga page.
the Russian really, I visited some pages at a time, and it really is a bit difficult to understand the translation

I think some languages have more complexity in forming ideas, or the idea can be very broad, just as a single word can have several meanings, several words can have the same meaning depending on the phrase.
seems a little Oxygen with the broadest syntax

it would be good to have a world language, English is accepted in a way as a language of greater acceptance, but in most countries where school is part curriculum is very poorly taught

[Charles Pegge]

Eduardo,

I have always been interested in the internals of programming languages, and wanted a more flexible, high performance Basic to work with. 64-bit compiling was also an interest.

In the past, I have worked with various Assemblers and processors, BBC-basic, AppleII and  Pet-Basic, MBasic Archimedes-Basic, TurboBasic/PowerBasic and FreeBasic but not Visual-Basic.

[edcronos]

so I understand, it's an old project that you defined as a hobby and that is going forward because of its professionalism and willingness to see as functional as possible,
  very good, I would like to have this capacity, I have a lot of ideas but I can not materialize them, one of them a few years ago I took the lead with a friend like sicios, but the society was not cool, and since I do not had financial conditions I quit,

I transitioned into a tk95 "ZX Spectrum" in childhood, my dream at the time was an msx
  when I started with the excel vba I took a long time to realize that it was a basic,
  after that I activated the old procedural memory. which gave me more fluency in writing than I wanted to do, but with a lot of goto and gosub,
  I did not even know what were functions and variables byref which led me to mount a macro that had the flow controlled by a handful of gosub's, I took a lot of ear jerking, but okay it worked very well and for me it's just one hobby

[edcronos]

from what I understand from what I read here,
 Oxygen has an independent syntax
on top of this has the fact that it is a compiler, and it is also compatible with 64bit
you can write something in the C structure but do not accept all of the C. "so it's not just copy and paste to work"
but ok, Basic is the focus, it supports multiple writing modes, but it's also not 100% compatible with some other Basic.
I just do not understand why even basic instructions with simple if's, for next, variables and arrays do not work copied from one to another, especially the arrays.

Oxygen boasts simplicity and superb flexibility.
 but that same flexibility looks like torture and a trap when it comes to the lack of documentation.

as they said in the forum there is a lot of things to get going, but there are also a lot of old versions that do not work in the newer versions, and all spread out.

and what is the Sys type, I see in the examples, but I can not determine the use, and in the help does not have specifying.

I'm sorry if I said some bullshit,

[Aurel]

-

[Charles Pegge]

sys is a signed integer that changes its size according to compiled binary mode: 32-bit or 64-bit. This is an essential type for all pointers and handles, including those inside UDTs, to maintain compatibility.

PS: I will be making operators &&  ||  ^^ true logical operators, as in C.

[edcronos]

Aurel
I think even simplicity has to have certain rules,
 and you have to agree that it is precisely because you do not have rules that Basic, although simple, easy to learn and program that has never been taken seriously by the professional market.
and each one that creates a Basic creates it within its own criteria, and soon leaves aside,
 and to change to another Basic, one has to learn and adapt practically everything and not just one or another fuction that had in one and not in the other. of course you have key functions that can put a project to waste

the problem is the type of variable determines the type of data that will work, selecting a wrong type may work in the test but cause intermittent errors.
 joining this with the flexibility of the oxygen one can do wrong things without realizing it.
so I wondered the absence of blocks of simtaxe, for asm and C
this must have led to many Oxygen error testing, and a much greater complexity


Charles Pegge
I hope you do not just modify Oxygen to fulfill the requests, many ideas often turn into just an alphabet soup

of course a greater compatibility may be good to reuse codes "but after all who had the brilliant idea of ​​using && || ^^ as operators ??"

but I know that sometimes we get new ideas to install on our Frankenstein