News: Urbane ECB Preprocessor Released

http://www.coco3.com/urbane/

Stephen Fischer has released a final version of the Urbane preprocessor for Disk Extended Color BASIC. It appears to recognize all Color, Extended, CoCo 3, and Disk BASIC commands. The main benifit of using a preprocessor like this is that it allows you to program in a more readable and structured manner. For example, Urbane doesn't need line numbers, and can use labels and long variable names. Your code can be much more modular, and you can focus on writing the right subrountines and functions instead of fighting with structure like you often will in ECB. If you prefer writing code in C++ or PASCAL, you'll love Urbane.

Urbane is a preprocessor, meaning you write the code, run it through Urbane and it spits out ECB code, which you then run on the CoCO. It appears to create very nice, tight ECB code at that. I've only played with Urbane a tiny little bit in an emulator, but it certainly appears to be a time saver. Even if it just makes it easier to follow the structure of an ECB program it's worth the download. Potentially a real time saver!