Mikefulton wrote:At the risk of starting a religious war... or at least another battle in the ongoing one...

Don't worry, it won't get out of hand and end up a locked thread.

I've been reading the messages in this forum section, and it's got me thinking.
Since I still maintain GFA unofficially I'll try and answer best I can.
First, let's be clear about something. I enjoyed using GFA BASIC back in the day. I bought it as soon as it hit the store, and I was as annoyed as anybody when there were compatibility problems on newer and different hardware like the Falcon030.
What you say is true, however you might be unaware of my updated GFA BASIC package. It's fully compatible with the old GFA, but it offers a new tasking editor, which means a better work flow. You can build and tweak a RSC file while coding, etc. It offers new features and the compiler support is built in. It also supports the coldfire, which the original GFA fails at. The interpreter is actually a separate process and if you crash and its not to severe the editor is still there with your source intact. It's a huge improvement over the way the old GFA works, it provides a full IDE. However, this updated GFA requires MiNT and thus a fairly fast Atari or clone.
But here's the thing... I don't really understand why anybody would want to write new code in GFA BASIC these days. It seems to me that whatever advantage there was to using GFA BASIC for some projects back in the day, most of the reasons don't really apply any more. And given the well-known compatibility problems that GFA has with non-vanilla hardware, I just don't understand why it seems to retain so much popularity.
I provide an updated library with many bug fixes. The old library has been fully dis-assembled, fixed and rebuilt from the ground up. I do not patch any of the files, this is true also of the compiler and linker, both rebuilt entirely from source. The same bug fixes are also applied to the interpreter, so you see the same results when compiled.
One thing people used to tell me back then was that they used GFA BASIC because it was affordable. Granted, that was a significant factor back then for many users, when something like Lattice C might be a couple hundred bucks while GFA BASIC was more like $60-$80. But these days you can get the GCC tools, or Lattice C, or Pure C, or pretty much anything you want for free, so cost certainly isn't a factor any more.
I do use PureC myself, but only when the context of the project forces me to, otherwise I use GFA. I guess its just my preference and I don't have to deal with a make file for simple projects.
Back in the day, I used to hear people make the argument that they were able to get things done faster in GFA BASIC. There's a certain amount of truth in that, but I think it's a misleading truth.
This can still apply, but it depends heavily on what you are doing. The GFA compiler does do a nice job, and one reason it does fly is the parameters passed to built in functions are register based.
If you haven't ever done anything with C, then yeah, you're probably going to get results faster with GFA BASIC instead. I mean, it's pretty obvious. You run the GFABASIC program, type a few lines of code into the editor, hit "RUN" and BANG! you've got some results that might even do what you wanted. By comparison, doing anything with C or Pascal or Assembly, for example, is going to require you to do more work before you get anywhere.
I don't think we get a lot of new GFA coders, maybe occasionally. But I still hold that belief that every system should have a version of BASIC, so newbies can get their feet wet, that's why I maintain it. Perhaps they will move on to C later. Since GFA now works on the firebee, I suppose it might seem attractive to some.
However, that advantage starts to disappear once your programs get to be longer than a few lines. The larger your project gets, the more the advantage starts to swing the other way towards something like C or Pascal. Things like code reuse and building an application framework are much more practical in those other environments. And yet, I keep reading threads about people creating some surprisingly large and complex programs in GFA BASIC.
My updated editor can INCLUDE files. If others use this feature I don't know, but it can do it. The updated GFA editor has a pre-processor pass at compile time that allows you to do some new stuff the old editor can't.
I guess if there's a question wanting to escape from these thoughts, it's this: Why use GFA BASIC instead of something else?
It might simply be personal preference. I find 'C' to be not very intuitive and the compiler errors cryptic at times and I try to avoid make files, but I started out with GFA back in the day.

Best viewed at full resolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHw7t7UGKmI (68k/coldfire building)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXjQ8zyp9Wo (assembler options)