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From: aw0g+@andrew.cmu.edu (Aaron Wohl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Question on Microsoft Quick Basic
Message-ID: <QaLvF_K00WB4I1LFAd@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 27 May 90 11:04:42 GMT
Organization: Computing Systems, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 58

David,
Some real programers (me anyway) that know c,assembly, pascal, macapp on
the mac still use quick basic.

I made a german vocabulary drill one afternoon in quick basic.  I was taking
a german class and was primarly interested in quickly making a program to
do the job not playing around with the enviorment.  The program is now
given out to all the first year students with vocabulary files for all
the chapters.  The students are happy, nobody ever complained  'ick look at
the about box it was written in basic'.

It depends on the market the program is addressed at.  If it is non computer
nerds that need something to address a need they have, I think basic
would be viable.  If the program where to be marketed to computer nerds
then it would be shuned due to the macho factor.

There have only been two releases of the quick basic.  It doesn't have
a big community of users on the net to help with problems (as far as
I know).  The error handling is really pretty funky.  You can have
an 'on error gosub' which is ok, but now a days basic programs don't have
line numbers they have labels.  So when you start getting an error all
of a sudden it is a real pane to track down the source line it happened on.
For new development I tend to use THINK c with TCL (think class library).
I can make an application as quickly as with basic now.  It is much simpler
to make a visual interface.  However if you are new to object oriented
programming and the mac allow a really big startup time to learn them.
Apple at there developer university has two classes that are usefull
for people starting out on the mac:
- Intro to mac programming: this is toolbox kind of stuff written in think
  c or think pascal (bare without the class libraries).
- MacApp (in pascal or c++) - This is apples object oriented programming
  environment.  The class also introduces what oop is.

An experianced basic programmer can do a programm in some areas (not to visual)
with quick basic right away.  It would look a littly non mac like, say
it would be an 85% solution.  The other major development systems take
a real long time to learn (think c/pascal with tcl, macapp pascal/c++).

There are some other possibilities for interactive compilable languages:
VIP (visual interactive programming) and Prograph.

I have a copy of VIP.  You draw flow charts.  The little boxes light up
(when debugging) as the program executes.  I found it diffacult to make
real programs in VIP and never really got anything usefull done with it.

Prograph looks real prommising.  A friend is using very heavily.  They
drew a big crowd at the apple world developers conference.   It looks like
a viable way to make real mac programs.  Menus and all sorts of graphical
things in windows can be created interactivly and tried out.  You can
set up all your menus and some windows as a prototype and then have it
evolve into your application.

On the compatablity with the pc version:  I read the pc manuals one day.
I think simple things like arithmatic are no problem.  However all the
userinterface (windows, menus, etc) are not compatable.  The pc version
of quick basic was recently upgraded to be able to do all sorts of fancy
os/2 stuff.
Aaron