Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: TrueBASIC (was Re: EZ-DOS, MS-D
Message-ID: <45900265@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 20 Aug 89 14:02:00 GMT
References: <125@bambam.UUCP>
Lines: 20
Nf-ID: #R:bambam.UUCP:125:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:45900265:000:888
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Aug 20 09:02:00 1989



>It is nice to see some good, compiled, implementations of BASIC
>hitting the street.  Thoughs of us who learned BASIC on mainframes
>were very surprised to find that microcomputer BASICs were
>interpreted. When I learned BASIC a good sized mainframe had a
>megabyte of ram, a 1 mip processor, and maybe as much as 100 megs of
>disk. 

I was very surprised to see that VAX Basic was not an interpreter.
I had always thought that the only reason for someone to use Basic is 
if they needed, for some reason or another, an interpreted language.
Real Basic (as opposed to ANSI Basic, which isn't Basic) is very useful
for small, easily changed things done once and discarded. It is like
a grown up calculator. Compiling destroys that. For real projects
there are compiled languages like C or Fortran. 

When I learned Basic, a good sized mainframe said "7094" on the front.

Doug McDonald