Release 4.7

The new year 2025 release!

This is a long overdue release, with many changes in many areas.

Language changes:

• Adds SIO statement
• Adds Fujinet support: NOPEN, NCLOSE, NSTATUS and NGET statements, see "nc" and "mastodon" examples.
• Support ADR for floating point variables.
• Adds %() function.
• You can now omit parentheses in string functions, like LEN "X" instead of LEN("X")
• You can omit the ; in the PRINT statements in many cases now, for example you can use PRINT "A=" A directly.
• New %TIME function that gives the time up to 24 bit precision (wrapping in about 3 days and 5 hours).

IDE and Atari compiler changes:

• Added an integer-only command line compiler, FBCI.
• The command line compiler now allows passing the file name in the command line, just use FBC PROG.BAS PROG.COM in the DOS prompt.
• A lot of size optimizations to keep the integer IDE at less than 8KB.

Fixes:

• Fixes compiling long DLI statements.
• Fixes for AND/OR mixing bools and integer operands.
• Fixes chaining COLOR() and RTAB() in PRINT statements.
• Fixes INPUT to allow reading up to 255 bytes into a string.
• Fixes to the IDE when editing long files or files without an EOL at the end, also the IDE should be slightly faster now.

Cross Compiler:

• Fixes on Windows cross compiler for filenames with spaces or Unicode characters.

• Better error messages:

  • show variable names in errors,
  • ASCII art with the error location,
  • shows errors on missing ending of loops or ifs.

• The cross compiler now deletes intermediate files, only keeping the resulting executable.

• Adds a command line to write a "compacted" listing from the source, aiding in the writing of ten-liners or other short programs.

• The compiler searches for it's files in more than one location now, in this order:

  • the FASTBASIC_HOME environment variable,
  • the path to the compiler executable,
  • the standard OS paths in Linux (/usr/share/fastbasic/ and /usr/local/share/fastbasic/).

  This makes easier to install the compiler as an OS tool

Happy New Year 2025!