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Happy 5th Birthday LBB!
Post by Richard Russell on Oct 22nd, 2016, 10:51am
Version 1.00 of LB Booster was released exactly five years ago today, on 22nd October 2011. By comparison with what we have now its compatibility with LB 4.04 wasn't very good, partly because so many subtle features of the language are undocumented (or work differently from what the docs describe) and partly because of limitations in the underlying BBC BASIC interpreter at the time (for example a maximum string length of 65535 characters).
I'd made sure that it ran all the example programs supplied with LB 4.04, and many that I found at LBPE and elsewhere (that was hard enough to achieve!), but it didn't take long to discover that there were several features that it didn't emulate accurately. There was a rapid set of updates to address some of these points, reaching version 1.40 before the end of the year.
Fixing some of the issues caused by limitations in BBC BASIC took longer, because it needed a major update to that interpreter to support things like huge strings and 64-bit integers (of course even to this day LBB doesn't support the arbitrary-precision integers that LB 4 has, but the numeric range is sufficient for the vast majority of applications). These features appeared in LBB v2.00 in mid-2013.
Another major update, v3.00, was released in March 2015. This introduced some important (although compatible) extensions such as Object Oriented Programming, Structured Exception Handling and compound assignment operators. At the same time the IDE acquired Syntax Coloring, which had been one of the few significant omissions compared with LB4 and LBW.
Immediately after this, active development of LBB was abandoned; this decision was taken, reluctantly, having failed to persuade the LB Community Forum to allow LBB to be discussed there. With even the mention of LBB being effectively banned, there was no way of promoting it to the bulk of Liberty BASIC users so I couldn't justify spending time on development. Instead I switched back to developing my main product, BBC BASIC, and have since released versions for Linux (86), Mac OS-X and Android (86).
Subsequently only 'maintenance' updates to LBB have taken place, to fix bugs and add a few very minor enhancements. I would expect this regime to continue for the foreseeable future, with the frequency of updates decreasing as the number of (fixable) bugs hopefully falls.
Richard.
Re: Happy 5th Birthday LBB!
Post by Jack Kelly on Oct 22nd, 2016, 2:01pm
Gratulerer med dagen, Richard, as they say here in Norway. I have added LBB to my desktop installation of Remember-It. Many HAPPY returns of the day!!
PS (added): I AM a newby. I first heard of LBB on Jan. 1, 2015, when you replied to my thread on the JB Forum. I read it MINUTES before it was deleted! Good show, indeed...
Re: Happy 5th Birthday LBB!
Post by joker on Oct 22nd, 2016, 2:10pm
Hey, a "fifth" of a good thing is very rewarding! 
Congratulations, Richard! I remember my 5th year in my business. It was hard to remember all that happened to get to that point.
I came into LBB at the beginning of 2015. It was a dark awakening to the state of Basic in general. Unlike other languages, Basic has not been promoted in the same way as other languages, so it was disheartening to find out that so many limitations still exist from the days when the IBM PC was new.
But that doesn't take away from the successful task that you took on with LBB! Good show, Richard!
Re: Happy 5th Birthday LBB!
Post by Alincon on Oct 22nd, 2016, 2:58pm
Thanks again for persevering with LBB.
Sadly, the author of LB has not.
r.m.
Re: Happy 5th Birthday LBB!
Post by RobM on Oct 22nd, 2016, 10:06pm
Congrats on the anniversary Richard!
Re: Happy 5th Birthday LBB!
Post by Mystic on Oct 24th, 2016, 4:58pm
Many thanks, and a salute, to you Richard!
I appreciate your efforts for saving LB and allowing me to continue using it (well LBB) because of all of the fixes you have done.
LB was practically become unusable with the problems I was having with it. Nothing major, but just annoying things and the lack of updating.
I raise a glass in cheers to you and your future efforts!
Excited to try the MAC and Android versions of BBC BASIC!
Here's to another 5 years!