Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn Subject: Re: More about BASIC vs. Pascal vs. C (the flame war continues !) Message-ID: Date: 15 Feb 91 16:25:45 GMT References: <5129@acorn.co.uk> Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 68 asmith@acorn.co.uk (Andy Smith) writes: > In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (mathew) writes: > >He said commercial SYSTEMS software. Little commercial systems software is > >written in FORTRAN, and almost none in COBOL. FORTRAN is restricted almost > >exclusively to scientific software, and COBOL is used almost exclusively > >for business data processing. > > You mean these aren't commercial systems?? (*sigh*) Please learn the difference between commercial software systems and commercial systems software. > Same with BBC BASIC, its only BASIC by name, but look how many companies > have now copied it. You can get BBC BASIC for PC's, Atari, Amiga, etc. There > must be something good about BBC BASIC, otherwise why would so many people > want to use it. Certainly if you want a BASIC, BBC BASIC is probably the least bad of a lousy bunch. > As far as micros go, they all get supplied with a BASIC as > standard. I do not know of a machine that get C or Pascal as standard?? The Atari ST was originally supplied with Logo as a standard language. In a typical Atari backwards move, they stopped bundling it after a couple of years. The Jupiter Ace was supplied with Forth as its standard language. The Macintosh is supplied with Hypertalk as a standard language. Every single UNIX machine gets C as the standard language, and many get Pascal, C++, or Lisp as well. To digress a little, it seems to me that there is quite a shocking level of ignorance in this newsgroup. One of the things which annoyed me about BBC Micro owners (at the time when I *was* one) was the way in which they shut themselves away in their own little clique and didn't seem to take any interest in the outside world. They seemed to believe that BBC BASIC was the greatest thing since sliced bread, simply because they had never used anything else. This attitude seems to have been inherited by Archimedes owners, to a certain extent. > >The BASIC interpreter for the Archimedes takes up 30 bytes? I'm impressed. > > The interpreter is in ROM, therefore it does not take any RAM from the user, > you only have to take into account the tokenized form of the program, and > its workspace. I *KNOW* that. I know exactly what an interpreter is, what a compiler is, and what the merits are of both of them. The point is that to say that an interpreted BASIC program is better than a compiled C program because the BASIC source code is shorter than the compiled C is to be deliberately misleading. You can execute the compiled C in isolation, whereas you can't execute the BASIC. Now, if you are mentioning the size of an interpreted BASIC program and ignoring the kilobytes of support code in the BASIC ROM, then you should compare it with a system where the C support libraries are in ROM. You will then find that both programs are about the same size. As it happens, I think that the original poster was perfectly aware of this, and put a :-) to indicate that he wasn't being serious. I was being sarcastic in return. mathew.