Thanks—and a new version

I want to thank everyone who has provided feedback on the 2.9.5 release of Yabasic. In most cases, the feedback I have received has been positive, and I'm very grateful for your encouragement and patience despite the imperfections and rough edges that still remain to be ironed out of the interpreter. I have also taken suggestions for improvement into consideration, and I'm currently working on addressing a few issues.

I'm releasing Yabasic 2.9.6 today (you can acquire it from yabasic.basicprogramming.org), which implements a few minor changes:

• a bug where the first internal command was not properly initialised has been fixed;
• the inc and dec commands have been added (at least for scalar variables);
• a bug related to use-statement parsing has been fixed;
• the special variables __time$ and __date$ have been added (time$ and date$ were removed unnecessarily, so please accept my apologies);
• the statement select is now a valid alternative (synonym) to switch;
• output is now flushed properly;
• the short-if form has been re-added.

I plan to re-add the goto, gosub, and label statements. Line number support, however, will probably not be implemented; it is simply impractical if line numbers cannot be updated properly.

I should note that from December 14 to December 30 I'll be away in New Zealand, and I'm not sure how much Internet access, if any, I will have during this time. Thanks again! I'm pleased and humbled that the Yabasic community is alive and well, and honoured to be working on Yabasic. It has been well worth the effort so far, and will continue to be so long into the future.