GFA Basic

GFA Basic for the ATARI ST

Combine the ease of Basic with some of the structure of Pascal and you have GFA. That is short said. GFA Basic is more than that. It is the easy to use editor, the complete set of commands, an interpreter and a compiler. The popularity of GFA Basic on the ST was enormous. 

For beginners in programming on the ST GFA is a very good start. It is a fast to learn programming language.

Program code can be short, clear and efficient. There are no line numbers. You can use procedures and functions like in Pascal. The original GFA editor is not GEM compatible. It is different, but easy to use.

You can write big programs in GFA, why not. But it becomes problematic with source codes where you want to edit more than one file.

Short, clear  and efficient. This is a complete program. Press Run and you are done.

Also comptability with for example 256 colours is not there in the old GFA editor. You can however patch it with the program Bastard. https://www.run-software.de/bastard.php

There is an updated version of GFA Basic developed by Lonny Pursell. It can be used with higher resolutions and colours. It requires 16MHz, 4Mb and a MiNT setup which is a bit too much for most real ST's. On an emulator or a machine on steroids this is a great programming environment. https://gfabasic.net/