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From: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: structured assembler (BASIC)
Message-ID: <1256@ism780c.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 31-Mar-86 21:58:09 EST
Article-I.D.: ism780c.1256
Posted: Mon Mar 31 21:58:09 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Apr-86 20:26:38 EST
References: <443@3comvax.UUCP> <7900003@ztivax.UUCP> <153@crin.UUCP> <7947@watrose.UUCP> <463@3comvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica, CA
Lines: 57
Keywords: BASIC

In article <463@3comvax.UUCP> mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz) writes:
>In article <7947@watrose.UUCP> tohaapanen@watrose.UUCP (Tom Haapanen) writes:
>>Then it would be well documented vomit.
>
>Pick up a book on MicroSoft Basic for the PC before you rant and rave about
>Basic being vomit.  The whole point I originally tried to make about
>Basic is that it is extremely well refined and that it has as many man
>hours of improvements made to it during the same time Unix has been refined.
>

Didn't he have a :-) after the "well documented vomit" comment?  Before
YOU rant and rave about something be sure it is serious!

>Another point you seemed to miss is that the development environment for
>Basic is quite good.  You can stop your program, display variables, patch
>the SOURCE CODE, and eliminate long boring compilations.  Then when the
>program logic is complete, it can be compiled ONCE and it will run
>pretty damn fast.
>

So?  You can get Pascal interpreters and C interpreters and Forth 
interpreters ( and probably SmallTalk and Lisp interpreters ) 
with almost all of these properties ( I don't think there are any
compiled SmallTalks ).

>In 'C', when you see a call like:
>w=opnwndw(xqtnm);
>the only way you can tell what it does is by using grep to find out
>where the function is defined and if you are lucky, it will be documented.

What does this have to do with C?

>
>At least in Basic, all of the keywords are WELL KNOWN,

Are you claiming that the keywords for C are not well known ?!?

> and no two programmers' opnwndw() functions are different (the language
>defines the call),

It does?  I have never seen an opnwndw function on any BASIC I have
used!

> and the language (Basic) tends to be geared
>toward using whatever hardware the interpreter is implemented on
>in a easy to use way.  Not many implementations of Unix (written
>in 'C') have been ported to machines and really use the hardware
>- READ ON - I have not seen a compiler that will use the string
>functions that the 808x family of processors provide.  These
>kinds of instructions (LODS, STOS, etc.) are what makes the
>processor FAST.

Any speed a BASIC interpreter gains from using the string instructions
is probably lost in the overhead of being an interpreter.
-- 

Tim Smith       sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim