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REALbasic 5 Preview
A Survey of What's New
Issue: 1.5 (April/May 2003)
Author: Matt Neuburg
Author Bio: Matt Neuburg is the author of
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 21,415
Starting Page Number: 21
Article Number: 1511
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1511.zip Updated: 2013-03-10 14:58:21
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Excerpt of article text...
And now, a report from the past about the future. REALbasic 5 was in an early beta stage as this issue of
REALbasic Developer was being assembled, but by the time you read this, it will have been released. This new version of REALbasic represents a major overhaul, and promises to be the most worthwhile upgrade REAL Software has produced in a long time. So even though by now (when you read this) things may look a bit different from how they do now (when I'm writing this), now (whatever that means) seems the most appropriate moment to introduce you to REALbasic 5. Sheesh, all this time-travelling is confusing!Watch Your Language
As reported elsewhere in this issue, the compiler has been replaced, allowing for the first time extensive improvements to the REALbasic language itself. These improvements range from small but welcome changes to major gains on the object-oriented programming front.
A number of syntactical constructs have been rationalized. In a For ... Next clause, the counter need no longer be an integer, and a new construct, For Each ... In, makes it easy to iterate over an array. Single-statement conditions can now appear as a single line of code. The rules on the placement of Dim and Const statements are somewhat relaxed. Function results can now be ignored. A subroutine's parameters can now be assigned to. The limitations on what sorts of values can be passed as ByRef parameters have been lifted somewhat. Subroutine parameters can be optional.
Here's some silly code just to illustrate some of these differences; things you couldn't have done in REALbasic 4.5 are commented:
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