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From: steve@tove.UUCP (Steve D. Miller)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: MAC Basic vs MS Basic?
Message-ID: <234@tove.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Jun-85 14:37:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: tove.234
Posted: Wed Jun 12 14:37:07 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Jun-85 05:15:12 EDT
Organization: U of Maryland, Laboratory for Parallel Computation, C.P., MD
Lines: 33

> ...
> The story I've heard is that MS Basic, version 1, was based on the typical
> MS Basic for typical PC's, which is why it was so lousy on the Mac.
> According to the story, MS Basic, version 2, *is* Mac Basic, after Microsoft
> bought it from the original developers.  I'm not sure this is entirely true,
> but there is a striking resemblance.  I haven't checked in much detail.
> I bought MS Basic a few weeks ago, but I've been tied up with other things
> and haven't done a lot with it.
> 
> -- 
> Ephraim Vishniac
>   [apollo, bbncca, cadmus, decvax, harvard, linus, masscomp]!wanginst!vishniac
>   vishniac%Wang-Inst@Csnet-Relay

   I have a copy of MacBasic (the one that Apple is/was going to market)
that I got from somewhere or another.  It is a very flaky pre-release version,
but it is (I believe, though I haven't looked at it in a while) more recent
than MS Basic 2.0 and (from poking around with FEdit) it looks like it
has well-nigh total toolbox support.  The toolbox routines are even called
with their Inside Mac names (i.e. there are functions like TEUpdate), and
there is even some stuff about it that leads me to believe that it may truly
be incrementally compiled (not just tokenized).  Given the above information,
I would think that it is still going to be released -- in fact, I think I
heard the words "late summer '85" somewhere -- and that it will be nicer
than MS Basic and about as nice as something as icky as BASIC can be.
If I get the time in the next few days, I'll try to poke about with my copy
and see what I can figure out, and let people know if they are interested.


-- 
Spoken: Steve Miller 	ARPA:	steve@maryland	Phone: +1-301-454-4251
CSNet:	steve@umcp-cs 	UUCP:	{seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!steve
USPS: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742