I like the choice of Lua and SDL, not only as a modern LOGO/BASIC alternative. I think it can go much further.

I guess as a minimum you want the editor to function to the level of notepad/pico/nano, and then perhaps have helpers with regards to indenting, and after that error marking similar to that of QBASIC, and after that syntax highlighting.

You might be surprised how "modern" BBC Basic is, even today.

yeah, it had some very well-thought-out features. dijkstra notwithstanding, i am glad it was my first language.

Hi Salvatore. I'll run it on my alpha board this evening and let you know how it currently performs.

That's awesome asb, thanks!

Works great on my Beagleboard already! 10 points to you for using SDL and making it build so cleanly ..

EDIT: just wanted to add, it works fabulously on my Open Pandora console as well!

Great :) Thanks you for testing it. Probably adding full screen support makes sense at this point.

Annnd .. here's a followup one day later. I released the PND for the Open Pandora console, in case anyone is interested:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/7405-here-is-...

Added fullscreen support and wrapped it in a launcher for file selection, courtesy of PickleLauncher (helpful utility for precisely this sort of thing in the Open Pandora scene..)

Quite easy to do! :)

BTW, I wanted to say that I think that Lua as a first-programming-language for kids is a great idea! So much easier to explain a Lua table to someone than types and so on .. And quite performant, in the end, eh? I've been using MOAI for cross-platform game development, and now your little project is going to get some love in the homebrew sense, too .. what about adding sound at some point?

Appears to be painfully sluggish under X (Raspberry Pi doesn't yet have graphics acceleration there, totally not your fault). Somewhat better under SDL on the framebuffer, but I keyboard input doesn't seem to be working there. I only gave this a really quick go and it's on a wheezy rootfs I prepared, but running a rather old version of the RPi kernel. I'll delve into it in more detail later in the week.

I'm also hoping to port this to the rPI: http://www.specbas.co.uk which is Sinclair BASIC for modern PCs... Seems the PI is going to be spoilt for choice :)