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Path: utzoo!watmath!jmsellens
From: jmsellens@watmath.UUCP (John M Sellens)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc,net.lang
Subject: Re: BASIC
Message-ID: <755@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Jan-86 02:20:19 EST
Article-I.D.: watmath.755
Posted: Fri Jan 10 02:20:19 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 10-Jan-86 07:27:14 EST
References: <1096@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Reply-To: jmsellens@watmath.UUCP (John M Sellens)
Distribution: na
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 28
Xref: watmath net.micro.pc:6482 net.lang:2026
Summary: 

In article <1096@osu-eddie.UUCP> mdf@osu-eddie.UUCP (Mark D. Freeman) writes:
>I do all my development using the IBM BASIC Compiler v2.0.
>
>Global and local variables, common variable areas, callable subprograms, no
>line numbers, and many other things make this a real language.

This does indeed sound like something that you can actually program with.
But your code is not at all portable, and you've cut yourself off from
a potentially much larger, and more interesting market.  (Of course, that's
your choice to make, to concentrate on the IBM PC market.)

We have a very large program for PC's that will go commercial this year
and was written in Pascal.  We converted to C, rather than using BASIC, Pascal,
Modula-2, etc. because it is portable.  Even if the libraries provided
by different compilers on different machines have different routines,
calling sequences, etc., we can still keep all our code in the same files,
using #ifdef's etc., and so one machine's version can't be out of date
with respect to the others.

I know of no other widely available language that will allow us to do this.
Sure, C has problems, but with the Waterloo-fixed lint, it works well
for us.

John

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