EndBASIC 0.3 is here

After a 6-month long hiatus caused by me hunting and changing jobs and cities, I am pleased to announce the release of EndBASIC 0.3! The Thanksgiving break has been as fruitful as I had hoped 😁

There are two major changes in this release.

1. The first is the official debut of the web-based interface. I introduced this months ago and have had it running on a “push on green” model, which means that the web deployment of EndBASIC is always tracking Git HEAD. This has made formal releases irrelevant which is, in part, why 0.3 is so far behind 0.2. But… I do believe in formal releases so I’m hoping to put some effort and make the web UI track releases instead and then use the “push on green” flow only for a preview site.

2. The second, and more interesting at this point to me, is the debut of an interactive, full-screen editor. Previous releases had a very rudimentary line-oriented program entry mechanism which mimicked Locomotive BASIC and GW-BASIC. As you can imagine this was way too inconvenient to play with, and also confusing: EndBASIC doesn’t support line numbers, so the numbers shown during program editing were meaningless. I had been wanting to add a full-screen editor from the beginning, but it was much more work than I could put at the time if I wanted it to play well with the web UI. But it does now.

All of this is better experienced than told :)

So either visit https://repl.endbasic.dev/ for an interactive session, watch this demo:

… or visit the project’s page at: https://www.endbasic.dev/. Enjoy! 🎉