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From: brazil.psych.purdue.edu!zhou@gatech.edu (Albert Zhou)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: MATRIX BASIC -- HOW BIG IS THE MARKET?
Keywords: design, question, Basic
Message-ID: <11655@j.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 91 03:33:40 GMT
References: <11651@j.cc.purdue.edu> <5326@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: compilers-sender@iecc.cambridge.ma.us
Reply-To: brazil.psych.purdue.edu!zhou@gatech.edu (Albert Zhou)
Organization: Purdue University
Lines: 30
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In article <5326@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> corbett@road.Eng.Sun.COM (Robert Corbett) writes:
>ANSI BASIC, X3.113-1987, provides matrix operations including addition,
>subtraction, multiplication, inverse, determinant, and scalar product.  I
>presume that BASIC implementations that claim conformance with the standard,
>such as True BASIC, implement those features (they are not optional).
 
So how is this BASIC doing these days? Does it have a lot of market and is 
it sold separately by vendors?

>If your package only includes simple matrix operations, I doubt you will find
>much of a market.  If your package includes support for complex matrices and
>analytic functions over them (not at all easy to implement), your sales might
>increase by dozens.

MATRIX BASIC of course will be more powerful than that. It will introduce
a few new operators, such as ~ (horizontal concatenation), | (vertical
concatenation), ` (transpose), \ (elementwise division), # (elementwise
multiplication, ...

Also, the original package has been designed for statistic processing. So
MATRIX BASIC could have many built-in functions such as sum(x), ss(x) (sum of
square), mean(x), var(x) (variance), ...

Unfortunately we haven't implemented complex matrix since there hasn't been
such need.
[True Basic is a commercial package whose authors include the original authors
of Dartmouth Basic.  I don't know how it's doing, but observe that I don't
see anything about it in the trade press. -John]
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