Simplicity

There was an interesting thread on our conforums site http://libertybasic.conforums.com recently where we discussed Windows API calls. Someone mentioned that the most useful API calls should all have BASIC equivalents.

I understand the reason this was suggested, but I have to disagree. I don't know how many people come to Liberty BASIC because they tangled with Visual Basic and found it to be too large and complicated. I program in Java for a lot of my work. It's big and unwieldy (it wasn't when it arrived in 1995). I can vouch for small is beautiful.

Most programming tasks don't need a big language.

Another important point to keep in mind is that as we move toward Macintosh and Linux versions of Liberty BASIC, we'll have to be very careful not to add many platform specific commands.