By far the best and most powerful Basic programming suite for the Macintosh. I whipped up my very first program in a matter of minutes without any need for documentation!

Unlike the commenters below I have never seen the old PDF documentation. The new local offline documentation is pretty easy to find examples and navigate. So I cannot complain about the documentation.

I have not used the wiki they refer to because I am normally disconnected from the internet when I program to avoid any potential distractions.

I am glad I did not read or listen to those commenters or I would have missed out on an excellent product. In less than 30 days I have recouped what I had spent on a license for this product and have no regrets on money well spent.

The beauty of this software is the chance to try it before you buy it.

P.S. Funny thing about the documentation: first everyone clamors for making it a Wiki so that they can contribute (I do), then they complain that it isn't in pdf format - and once again you are missing the point that you CAN print a pdf from the Wiki.

Just click on the "Create a book" link on the documentation wiki and you have an up-to-date pdf version of the wiki

http://docs.realsoftware.com/index.php/Main_Page

But hey, it's SOOOOOO much easier to put the blame somewhere else …

Hmmm. Still no Cocoa support.

Remind me. What platform is this software designed for?

REALBasic is a general purpose programming language.

Pros:

+ Available for Macintosh, Windows and Linxu including cross-compilers between hosts.

+ Has everything you need, and more. For example, I needed to write software to communicate with the Internet, using HTTP. This is rather difficult to get right, since HTTP allows partially downloaded documents to be usable before everything has arrived. I first tried to write this from scratch, and did not get it working. Then I noted that a HTTP package was already available in REALBasic, and got my program running at no time. This is just one example of what is available when you need it.

+ Good on-line debugger.

+ Easy to get new applications running.

+ A compiler, compiling into source code, not only an interpreter like many other modern programming languages. This makes code efficient for complex, time-onsuming applications.

+ Full built-in support for the Unicode character set. My advise for new applications is to use Unicode only, If you get input data in other character sets, thn convert into Unicode as soon as you get it. If you really need other character set, support is available for many other character sets, like ISO Latin 1.

+ Good built-in support for databases using SQLite or other data base systems.

+ Good support for building simple user interfaces, including text editing in text boxes. You can build a new simple text editor in an hour or less.

Cons:

+Text string handling somewhat inefficient because you cannot modify text strings without copying them.

+ I lack a set of very simple program templates, like "copy text file, modify it, output as a new text file" or "Copy all files in a folder and produces modified versions in a new folder".

People should be aware that RealBasic is *not* backwards compatible--if you write a program in RealBasic, it won't even open in the version they put out 5 years from now. My library of hundreds of RealBasic programs (that were written between 2001 and 2005) is totally useless now because none of them will open in the 2008 and 2009 versions (I've talked to RealBasic staff about this and they claim that this phenomenon is totally normal...sure it is).