Source Code releases seem a common theme at the moment... although in this case, the AMOS source code is not for general release.
The source code has been made available to someone (sorry, I can't remember names), who intends to start development of AMOS again.
The release of the AMOS source code must be a dream come true to the many AMOS coders out there. Whilst we shouldn't expect an all-new AMOS overnight (apparantely the sources are not well documented, and there would be a lot of work to do), it seems that AMOS may make a return, rather than having to rely on 'extensions'.
As an AMOS coder myself for many years, that sort of attitude *annoys* me. Yes, it is true, AMOS is severly behind the times. But the fact remains, no programming language has properly filled the gap it has left. The gap of a programming language that is really easy to get to grips with, but still very powerful.
Yes, Blitz fulfils this to some extent, but from what I've seen of it, it just doesn't have the ease of use that AMOS has, and this seems the general consensus of most people.
AMOS was the first language that I could use to produce reasonable programs (my efforts with Speccy Basic were not too great!) - and the same must have been true for thousands of people. It was a dream language! But sadly, development stopped, and we didn't even see an AGA version. This is not something to laugh at - this is a bad thing for the Amiga generally, in the same way many other companies have stopped development for the Amiga.
I personally have moved onto C now; not because I have developed a hatred of AMOS, but rather, I feel that I am able to move to a lower level language as I grow more experienced. But if I was a newcomer to programming - which language could I pick, as an easy language, that still gives me real power? Blitz is the only one that fits the bill, but as I said, not as good as AMOS once did, in terms of ease of use.
Since Europress farted off to the PC, to concentrate on *really* great applications, users have been eager to get hold of the source code, but with no luck. Extensions have advanced the language, even giving complete OS support - but sadly no AGA extension (apart from via the OS). The source code was offered for sale, but only at a figure in the thousands.
Now, it seems, someone has got hold of the source code (legally!), and is now officially the new developer of AMOS.
So what could we see... well, thanks to extensions, it is possible to write OS friendly applications with AMOS, which can use AGA. But even so, these tend to be rather complicated affairs, lacking the ease of that AMOS is supposed to offer (the OS DevKit, for example; it is an excellent extension, with loads of features, but the fact remains that it is harder to use - harder than doing it in C, in fact!) A 'built in' implementation would be a must.
Returning to the 'native' AMOS screens - what of them? Well, first I would suggest that such screens should actually not exist as separate 'hardware ports', but instead exist as intuition screens (the last thing the Amiga needs at this time is more hardware banging software). Of course, the beauty of AMOS was the ease with which you could set up sprites, bobs, and animate them all easily under interrupts. Whether on an intuition screen or not, this should still be possible, and of course extended fully to AGA.
But at the same time, we need to think of graphics cards, so full support of RTG should be in there, not to mention AHI for sound cards.
Support for all of the latest OS 3.1 (and 3.5?) features, whether it's gadgets, appitems, locale or whatever, and support for gadget extension systems such as ClassAct and MUI would be great too.
Lastly, being able to compile for specific processors (not just the 68000), as well as for FPUs - and PPC support would be great.
Well, that would be my wish list for a super new AMOS. Such a language would be excellent - but there's a hell of a lot of work for the new developer to do, so we could be in for a wait (but then, we've waited long enough, anyway). He is recruiting a development team - details will surely be available on the AMOS mailing list.
Long Live AMOS!
Mark