Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!galen!leue
From: leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: ** Is MS QuickBasic worth looking at?
Message-ID: <20553@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 13 Jun 91 21:28:45 GMT
References: <51051@muvms3.bitnet>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Organization: General Electric Research & Development
Lines: 36

In article <51051@muvms3.bitnet> mcguffey@muvms3.bitnet (Michael McGuffey) writes:
>
>Does anyone have any experience using Microsoft's QuickBasic.
>
>Should it be discounted as a toy language or can it be used for developing
>serious applications?  In particular, can it create dialogs, alerts, access
>resources, etc.?  What about getting to the toolbox?
>
>Thanks,
>-- michael

Well, there's good news and bad news about MS QuickBasic:

The good news is that QB is CLOSE to a serious Mac development system.
There is reasonable Toolbox support for most of QuickDraw, the compiled
code runs fairly fast (not as fast as Think C), and the overall package
is pretty solid.

The bad news is that QB is broken under System 7.0.  Specifically,
the compiler hangs about halfway through compilation.  MS won't say
when a fix will be available.

THe rumor mills say that MS is planning a major upgrade to QB, including
a lot of the features of the DOS version -- symbolic constants, a
real debugger, etc.  This would be very nice.

I'd also like to see them add support for the "missing" pieces of
the Toolbox, like regions, color QD, etc.

I've been calling MS every few weeks to try to find out what their
plans are for QB, but they are being pretty tight with information.

-Bill Leue
leue@crd.ge.com