It had a reasonable range of structured programming commands — procedures with local variables and parameter passing by value or reference, loop constructs, etc.

GFA BASIC integrated neatly into GEM and TOS, the Atari ST's operating system, providing menus, dialog boxes, and mouse control.

The tokenized source files were a benefit in other ways too — for instance, GFA BASIC allowed users to include binary data in their BASIC code via an "INLINE" statement, and could even be integrated with the GFA Assembler to allow users to develop machine code programs inside INLINE statements in order to accelerate particular areas of a program.

Some editions of the GFA manual were printed with black ink on red paper, in an attempt to thwart photocopying and bootlegging.

The effectiveness of this tactic was questionable,[4] and the manual returned to the usual black-on-white format after complaints from colour blind users and the proliferation of re-typed copies on the Internet.

Software professionals who wanted high-performance code tended to stay with the more "technical" languages, and to regard BASICs as inferior.

These allowed users to create windows and dialog boxes populated by standard components (text, buttons, frame outlines) with the help of a drag-and-drop interface and object-oriented editing.

As a simple text-based code creation system, it also lacked the exciting new "visual" user interfaces of its better-known competitors.

Without a large marketing budget, or a clear reason why journalists should write about it, GFA BASIC for Windows remained a comparatively obscure product.