On Monday 2004-06-07 18:22, Alan Dayley wrote:
> I have a neighbor who is paralized and uses voice commands to run his
> Windows computer.  He develops software for himself in VB so that he can
> add to his voice commands and speech recognition functions.  He has shown
> interest in using Linux but I cannot answer his speech recognition
> quesitons.  I have started researching a bit but I wanted some opinions
> from the list, assuming people here have dealt with this.
>
> I am confident that speech recognition tools for Linux exist since there
> is a speech recognition HOWTO and other information is easy to find.  I am
> most concerned about his development needs.  What scripting and
> programming tools can he use in Linux to replace the capability he now has
> with VB and VBA in Windows?
>
> This is a quesiton that applies outside of persons with handicaps so a
> discussion on "VB and VBA replacement" is a good thing to have for
> everyone.
>
> (I post the question here instead of the devel list to reach a wider
> audience.)
>
> Alan


I take it as evidence of the FOSS community's connection to academia instead 
of busine$$ that implementations of BASIC and COBOL for Linux are very 
limited and partial. I know of no good FOSS BASIC, though there may be 
commercial products for Linux.  Of course, a non-MS BASIC might be *very* 
different from VB.

So ... if you want to convert to Linux, kiss your VB code and skills goodbye.

That said KDE has a basic sub-project called KBasic, but it sounded very new.  
If your friend can wait two or three years....
http://www.kbasic.org/

The obvious VB substitutes are:
TCL/TK
PERL
Python
Guile (a variation on Scheme.  This involves not just new skills but the 
cognitive jump from procedural-imperative to functional programming.)
Delphi (maybe, not free from Borland.)

I expect that the RAD programming environments aren't up to MS standards.  
(How often have I been told "I our shop we program Korn with vi."  They wince 
when I say I use PERL and emacs in an effort to avoid both Korn and vi.)  
PERL and the Bash/Korn scripting languages are analogs to a lot of VBS for 
system scripting.  Unfortunately there is no universally standard for 
application scripting comparable to VBA, Guile might come closest.


I think of the above as 3.5 generation languages.  (Less easy and abstract 
than SQL but MUCH easier than Ada or Java.)

At the third level of complexity there are:
C
C++
Objective C (obscure?)
Java 
Lisp (could be considered obscure, except that it many FOSSers like it so 
much.)

And there are no shortage of obscure languages that have more support that 
BASIC including:
Ada
APL
Eiffel
Pascal
Prolog
Ruby
Scheme
Smalltalk

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