New Focus – Introducing Qt

When this project was started, the plan was to first develop all the internal routines (parser, translator, recreator, etc) and wrap a simple command line interface around it initially for testing before tackling a modern interface (GUI).  I even went as far as starting to learn about using the Console mode on Windows (though this couldn't be used on Linux).  That was the purpose in parsing immediate commands.

Over the past year or so, I have been learning and using Qt, a cross-platform application framework (and it is Open Source).  With Qt, it is fairly easy to develop programs with a sophisticated GUI, plus it does a whole lot more.  So instead of fooling with some antiquated command line interface, the project will be transitioned over to using Qt.  This desire accelerated after discovering the Basic-256 program early this year.  This program is a great platform for teaching programming (was formally called Kid-Basic).  This program also uses Qt.

It is not totally clear all what is necessary for this transition to Qt, but several items come to mind.  The classes implemented towards the beginning of the project, the List and Stack classes, will be removed and the Qt equivalents will used in their place.  Though not necessary, variable and function names will be changed to the Qt way of naming.  The exceptions used during initialization will be removed as there are no exceptions in Qt.

Since this will be a major change in development, the Release 0.1 series will be concluded and development of the Release 0.2 series will begin.  The change in direction mentioned with Release 0.1.15 will continue after the transition to Qt.  First though, the computer needs to set up for Qt Development...