Having carefully read your messages and you Not having carefully read mine... I spent several years looking for a good Basic board and software that wasn't in the "Gold Plated" class and after having spent a great deal of money and time what I discovered was that C and C++ are universal, Basic Even with Amicus, Swordfish, Mikrobasic, Melabs and the Proton compiler were really novelties.. From what I've seen in the embedded market basic is used mainly by people who cannot or will not use C and or C++.
I actively watched the Crownhill Sites, both Proton and Amicus and the Melabs and Mikro sites and found little activity from day to day, compared with the activity I see here and I made my decision from there based on the activity seen on the "Basic" sites. I don't doubt that the Core Basic compiler is the greatest thing since the 4004 grew up (Yes I do remember it, Very Well...). I didn't need you lauding the software at all. A good part of my "Comparison" was based on an earlier version of Core Basic. The Basic supplied with the Coridium. And as to the Wunderkind "New Core Basic"... If I make a mistake with an Arduino a new chip costs about $6.00... The Arduino for me isn't about building a controller I can buy those off the shelf. It's about learning the language. If I wanted to build a controller I'd probably use Amicus and just layout a board for the task. I think you also missed the concept that I wanted to learn a new language, one used both commercially as well as for private or experimenter use and Core Basic simply doesn't fit any of that. It for all it's power has IMO had its 15 minutes of fame and little if anything has really happened since. C begat C++, Java and a number of other languages as well. I consider C and C++ as dynamic and changing computing as we know it today. I wrote code way back when Dos was the only real game in town. Microsoft PDS 7.1 lacks a little of the luster of Visual Studio but I wrote applications in that language that I used from Dos 3 to Windows XP. The apps I wrote worked well and so did the control apps I wrote for the products I designed from 1992 to 1998 or 9. I was the design engineer for a small company in Costa Mesa Ca. My principal task was the design of Irrigation controllers and schedulers (clocks) and I used PDS 7 for the windows 3 applications I wrote to control the devices I designed and built... However If I had it all to do again I'd still choose to learn C++ Primarily for the education but mostly because C and C++ is Mainstream. My intent here isn't to make Knight Rider type junk, Cute but quite useless except for personal identity statements. SolderCore... $80.00 for a Creative Commons Board?. The PCB burdened fully with the exception of the basic is about the same as a Mega in cost... But I can't take what I did on a Corebasic board and re port it to another board.
Renasys, ST Micro STM32, TI MSP430... and there are likely newer ones as I write this commentary. All readily available and INEXPENSIVE, WITH GOOD FREE COMPILERS
Not to mention GCC and all the work that went into that or AVR Studio and ALL MAINSTREAM and FREE The Soldercore board does have a great deal of appeal but when I look at the board I see 50% of a fast and powerful processor WASTED... No Visible I/O to harness all that power especially when compared to a STM or a TI MSP.
SolderCore, Cute, Powerful BUT I can simply buy a Mega 2560 and make a board and know that I have good free tools to make the board function as I intend
My project is strictly retirement entertainment. I am designing and writing code that needs all the I/O for a Mega... Would an ITEAD 3.2" GLCD fit on the SolderCore board and leave ANY I/O left over?. When I am done I will have 2 sets of radios, one @ 450 Mhz commercial frequencies and 3 or 4 2.4 GHz transceivers as well as 2 4D Systems 3.2 PT SGC displays to control my room lighting, ventilation, Display inside and outside temp and RH, A barometer and a security system for my apartment ,garage, and greenhouse as well as complete data logging both to my PC, network and controller for temp, baro and RH data so it can be graphed as a beginning of a controllable environment for me. So far I have about 40K bytes of code and I expect to write another 30K bytes, Modules and Devices one at a time. A great deal of what I am doing now is simply learning a language, one that is immediate and uses the web for support and information NOT ACCESSIBLE AT ALL From the Internet without direct intervention through both radio, 450MHz Commercial or Amateur Radio (My Call is WA7EMS) and the phone company.
I got off to a bad start and shouldn't have aired my misadventures with the earlier Core Basic used in the Arm Express board.
The Soldercore board is IMO an expensive oddity. Perhaps had I found a Basic that wasn't nearly a Thousand dollars for a full featured configuration... 400 to 700 dollars last time I checked and easily portable across a dozen Atmel chips as is the Free and very rich set of tools I might have taken the easy way out and just used basic. Hoow Much is an installable compiler for Core Basic and how many TI chips does it work with, can it be used on other devices... perhaps the LPC2106 I own. If this rant seems uneven forgive me but I have a sick room mate and my attention is frequently divided... I also very
The Soldercore board is much too expensive, perhaps it's the cachet of price.... Gee the language is great and the board costs a lot of money... So It's Gotta be great...
If I could buy the basic in the 30 to 50 dollar range for a one seat or 2 seat license and it was easily ported to any 32 bit proc then I might buy it. I do rather think that the Arduino has the "Best Bang for the Buck" of ANY product on the market today. ALL Strictly IMO, based on many years of Mistakes...
Edit... stray thoughts
Interesting bench mark, The Vic 20 is 30 years old and as I remember it had a 4 MHz clock for a 6502... A Proc with one register. Intel had 6 or 8 8 Bit and many of those (I remember the E register had an extendable width) in the '88 and went larger as the X of X86 got bigger, So which got tested, I wonder?
The BenchMark? is Here: Home
Bob
Btw I really feel that this thing should be moved or buried as it is inappropriate to continue this discussion any more here and I am thinking that I should Never have begun it... Here at least.