Hi Bob, thanks for replying (and on a weekend of all things!).
In general it's good to hear that MapBasic isn't being dropped, though i do find the lacking of certain features (e.g. classes, structs, pointers) frustrating at times.
I have actually found it quite unfortunate on several occasions that .NET addins require an MBX to launch 😋. In the past I was hoping I'd be able to use COM interop to launch a .NET add-in, but found that was unfortunately not possible without an MBX. Perhaps a future feature? 😋 To get around this, for my Javascript based system, I've been testing compiling C# to DLLs dynamically with DLR. This way I can make sure a fixed MBX can call the same DLL, but each time with different code.
I did start building an open source IDE for MapInfo. I seem to remember the last time i worked on it I chickened out as I realised I'd have to setup a system to download a MapBasic compiler, because I doubted I could transfer the compiler with the IDE (for legal reasons), and although I started building a MapBasic compiler, I never did finish it. That being said there are so many features I'd like to add to the IDE (e.g. ribbon editors, ability to attach binary data to files, automatically building project files, generation of header files from code etc.).
It does already have syntax highlighting. It is being built with Ace (ace.c9.io) using Electron (https://github.com/electron). You can find the started highlighter here: https://github.com/sancarn/Ace-MapBasic-Syntax. Perhaps at some point PB could open an open source IDE, it'd at least prevent the legal distribution issues and would speed up development (depending on how many others would be willing to chip in). Anyway, I'll stop rambling!