Many IT professionals wrote their first computer programs with GFA-BASIC on an Atari ST. The language and its developments still bring joy today.

Unforgotten programming language: GFA-BASIC as a milestone and evergreen The golden eighties Lots of cult material Article in c’t 27 / 2020 read The world would be poorer for many games and applications, if not Frank Ostrowski 1986 had created his uncomplicated and powerful language for structured programming , which silenced some BASIC despisers and transformed hosts of testers into creative hobby developers.

GFA-BASIC combined Merkma le from Pascal and C with the easily accessible BASIC vocabulary expanded by powerful commands, e.g. for graphic functions. Self-written programs already achieved good performance in the interpreter, the run-only version of which could be passed on for free. The 2-pass compiler available since the beginning 1987 accelerated the execution clear after once and was also valued for the compact code it generated.

Except for Ataris 16-Bit- Computers on which GFA-BASIC became the unofficial standard, interpreters and compilers also appeared for Amiga, MS / PC-DOS and 16 – Bit Windows without there however to acquire great importance. For 32 – Bit-Windows a compiler version with integrated development environment is available; the most recent version, which has been further developed by lovers 2019 has been updated and is even compatible with Windows 10.

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