Great simulation of BASIC but... – "Smart BASIC" programming language Review

A fairly complete simulation of BASIC, reminds me of writing programs on my Commodore 128 in the 1980’s. It is, however, missing a couple useful commands from BASIC 7 (for example, no GETKEY for getting a single key press or a series of single key presses.). But it adds a ton of extra useful commands. An extremely useful app for writing quick, simple programs on my iPad! Be aware that iPad keyboard’s default double-quote character will not work in string names in smartBASIC (not so smears). You can also hold the “ key on the iOS keyboard to make it use the “non-smart” version of the double-quote character). The developer really should make this app work with the stock keyboard on iPads. Another downside is that there is no way to share your program files once written - there is no “share” or “export” button anywhere in the app. I should be able to select my .txt file, hit a “share” button and bring up the standard share interface for iOS devices (so I can send it right to the smartBASIC app on my son’s iPad, for instance). It also doesn’t seem to store your programs in iCloud. Importing images into smart BASIC is also needlessly unwieldy - you HAVE to go through DropBox, which doesn’t play nicely with iOS. You can’t import directly from the Photo Album into smart BASIC’s file system and you can’t use a 3rd part file explorer app to copy files into smart BASIC’s Files folder in iOS (because it apparently doesn’t have one). It’s almost like the app wasn’t written for iOS at all, they just ported it to iOS, but didn’t actually fully support the iOS platform. I had to take 2 stars off the review for this incomplete iOS integration. In any case, I loved teaching myself programming in the 80’s with BASIC and I’m hoping to use this to teach my son the same way, if they can fix the app. EDIT: added a star for the debugger button, letting me see the current value of all my variables - very nice! EDIT: turns out it can’t really handle game creation very well. I tried making a Star Control-style ship combat game (something I wrote in BASIC on my actual C=128) and it just can’t handle it. The program slows down and even comes to a halt when multiple sprites animate or more than one sound is playing (well, trying to play - it only plays back one sound at time!). It’s disappointing to discover this only after I got all the game mechanics working and now am trying to put in audio/visual polish. Subtracted a star for this.
Review by Sean & Daddy on "Smart BASIC" programming language.