Chapter 2. Programming with REALbasic

REALBASIC IS A LINE-ORIENTED, STATICALLY TYPED, object-oriented, and event-driven programming language with single inheritance. Whew. That just about sums it up. If you know what this chapter's first sentence means, then much of this chapter will be a review of familiar concepts. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read on.

If you are new to programming in general, or to object-oriented programming in particular, you should read this entire chapter. It will introduce you to the basic concepts and terminology you need to know to make sense of the rest of the book. In addition to those introductory concepts, this section covers REALbasic's intrinsic data types, built-in functions, and the steps required to create your own modules and classes.

There's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem when writing about programming languages, especially REALbasic. To get started, you need to learn some basics about the IDE, but to learn the basics about the IDE, you'll need to understand some fundamental programming concepts.

In an effort to overcome this obstacle, I'll provide a brief introduction to the IDE in the next section.