Editing Liberty BASIC (section)

== Background ==
Liberty BASIC was written by Carl "Gunner" Gundel and published in its first release by his company, Shoptalk Systems, in 1991. It has progressed steadily since then. {{As of|2018|alt=The last published update}} to the software, version 4.5.1, was in June 2018.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.libertybasic.com/news.html|title=Liberty BASIC News|website=www.libertybasic.com|access-date=2019-01-25}}</ref>

Though Liberty BASIC has its share of limitations in its design for advanced programming, it provides an introductory integrated development environment, IDE, for moderate to advanced users of Windows and OS/2. [[Dynamic-link library|Dynamic-link libraries]] (DLLs) are available. In its current version, it runs only on [[Microsoft Windows]], and under Wine on Linux.  Alpha testing of Liberty BASIC v5.0 is underway with versions that run on [[Microsoft Windows]], [[MacOS|Mac OS X]], Linux and on the Raspberry Pi as well.

Liberty BASIC does not compile to native code. Instead it compiles the code written in the IDE to an encrypted file with the extension TKN. This file is then executed by an EXE file that carries the same file name, although this may change with the release of version 5.