GFA BASIC (as of version 2.0, the most popular one) was, by the standards of its time, a very modern programming language. It did without line numbers, one line was equivalent to one command, and it had a reasonable range of structured programming commands (procedures with local variables and parameter passing by value or reference, loop constructs, etc.). It wasn't possible though to create structures or other agglomerated data types, and modularization was only rudimentary, making GFA BASIC best suited for small and medium-sized projects.

On the upside, the interpreter was compact and reasonably fast. It was shipped with a runtime which could be distributed freely with your own programs. Later, a compiler was available, too, which increased execution speed by another factor of roughly 2. GFA BASIC integrated neatly into GEM and TOS, the Atari ST's operating system, providing menus, dialog boxes, and mouse control (see WIMP interface).

Although the source code was usually stored in a tokenized version to save room on disk, pieces of code could also be saved in ASCII form, and as such made it possible to set up reusable libraries.

Trivia

In a time before scanners and online help, the GFA manual came printed black on red paper, to avoid successfully photocopying and bootlegging it.

The name is derived from the company ("GFA Systemtechnik GmbH"), which distributed the software.

External links

• gfa-basic.liebenstein.de/index_en.htm — GFA-Basic Community
• Atari GFA Basic 3 (LST format) to Java 1.0 converter
• http://www.bright.net/~gfabasic/ — A site with resources and links for GfA Basic on the Atari ST
• GokMasE´s GFA Page — links / source / manuals - Another site with resources and links for GFA Basic on the Atari ST
• RUN! Software — comprehensive IDE, application builder, runonly interpreter, library with new features and bugfixes (site German, docs English)
• X11-Basic — A BASIC interpreter with full X graphic capability with a syntax similar to the Atari ST implemetation of GfA Basic.

• http://www.tigen.org/gfabasic/index.php — GFA Basic on TI89! (French)
• http://www.people.freenet.de/p.hinz.kunz/index_e.html Code and downloads (GFA-Basic for Windows 32-Bit)
• http://www.vistoso.de Code and Downloads for Windows 16/32-bit in the section of Joe Hurst (German)^

BASIC programming language family | Amiga software | Atari ST software

GfA-BASIC