Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!newstop!sun!gek@earnest
From: gek@earnest (Jerry Kreuscher)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Re^2: TrueBASIC (was Re: EZ-DOS, MS-DOS compatible OS)
Summary: True ANSI BASIC?
Keywords: BASIC, TrueBASIC, X3J2
Message-ID: <122760@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 21 Aug 89 16:30:21 GMT
References: <14980@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <125@bambam.UUCP> <1635@bucket.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: gek@earnest.sun.com (Jerry Kreuscher)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 27
In-reply-to: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)

Very late in the ten year long process of inventing the standard, I
attended three ANSI BASIC technical committee (X3J2) meetings on
behalf of a former employer.  The members with whom I spoke expressed
great distaste for GWBASIC.  They were resolved to standardize an
entirely different, incompatible dialect, and they had no care that
this would be an invention rather than a standardization.

Microsoft did not care to participate in the work of X3J2.
Interpreters in the style of GWBASIC were and still are the defacto
standard.  It appeared that Microsoft considered the work of X3J2 to
be irrelevant.  Outside of Dartmouth and NBS (now NITS), most of the
world agrees.

I am surprised to read in this newsgroup that TrueBASIC conforms to
the standard.  I remember being surprised to find that release 1.0 did
not conform.  It was advertized to be "based on" the standard, but it
was based on the (then "proposed") standard in approximately the same
sense that movies on television sometimes are based on novels that I
have read.  Has that changed?

The only released conforming implementation that I have seen comes
from NKR Research of San Jose, CA.  I have no information about the 
machines to which it has been ported, though.

Jerry Kreuscher (gek@sun.com)

Disclaimer:  I speak only for myself.