Last change
24.03.2008

.

.

The Omikron Basic Story

Scientists, engineers, students, and others are programming with Omikron Basic since 1985. Read about the benefits of this easy to learn programming language.

Omikron Basic was originally developed in the 80s to be used on ATARI computers. After that, it was mainly used by scientists and engineers to find solutions for complex and mathematically demanding problems. For example, this is how an extensive program to simulate climatic changes was created. One engineering office uses a program written in Omikron Basic to calculate ship constructions; an institute for differential geometry uses a program written in Omikron Basic to calculate solution curves and their graphical representation. The list is endless. With the appearance of Omikron Basic for Apple Macintosh, all of these complex applications are now able to utilize the enormous computation power of the PowerPC processor.

Omikron Basic is especially well suited for these demanding tasks, because it supports all important mathematical functions and even contains matrices and the ability to perform determinant arithmetic. Since all executing routines are written in the assembler programming language, a high executing speed of the compiled programs is the result.

At the same time, programming in Omikron Basic is as easy as one expects from a BASIC programming language. Just open a new programming window, type in the desired programming code and with just one mouse click ('Debug' or 'Compile & Run'), the program can be tested right away.

While text is being typed in, the Omikron Basic editor already changes the text to a symbolic intermediary code. This process, also called tokenizing, provides the user with a variety of considerable advantages; just a few of these are as follows:

Syntax and non-declared variables are already checked when typing in text. This helps to avoid programming errors early on.

The tokenized source code is much shorter (most often less than half) than the written code. This means that little space is being used up in the buffer and on hard drive.

The compiler is able to translate a tokenized code in just a few seconds - even for very long programs. This results in practically no compiler waiting time, and it is possible to develop programs very efficiently and effectively.

Most of the programming tasks do not require extensive knowledge of the Mac OS. Yet, many of the functions of the Macintosh operating system can be reached from within Omikron Basic (see the program SpeekText.BAS in the DEMO folder of the demo version). In addition, Omikron Basic provides so-called output windows, which are managed by Omikron Basic and allow any program, no matter how simple, to run neatly in the multitasking environment of the Mac OS. This is ideal for scientists and engineers, who would rather concentrate on their problems at hand than work through 30 volumes of "Inside the Macintosh."

Advanced programmers have a wide variety of libraries at their disposal to fulfill special requirements such as complex numbers, numerical and statistical functions, programming of user interfaces, etc. These libraries can be integrated into Omikron Basic as command extensions. The user can even create user specific libraries with the help of the LibraryMaker. Thus, Omikron Basic is also well suited for larger projects. This is proven by the fact that Omikron Basic itself was written with Omikron Basic with the use of the Extension Library, EasyGem Library, and Assembler Library.

The detailed manual enables even beginners to work quickly with Omikron Basic; they will write their own programs in a very short time.

Further information can be obtained in the manual and on our feature page.

We offer a demo version to test the program, which can be downloaded at once free of charge.