Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!ames!lll-lcc!pyramid!athertn!ericb
From: ericb@athertn.Atherton.COM (Eric Black)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: My 1.4 Wish.
Message-ID: <657@mango.athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 5 Apr 89 00:27:04 GMT
References: <8904020420.AA25126@jade.berkeley.edu> <11219@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: ericb@Atherton.COM (Eric Black)
Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 31

In article <11219@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes:
>In article <8904020420.AA25126@jade.berkeley.edu> CRONEJP@UREGINA1.BITNET (Jonathan Crone) writes:
>>PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT AMIGA BASIC for 1.4....
>>
>	I think Commodore's pretty much locked into AmigaBASIC from
>MicroSoft.  But just in case they aren't...
>
>	Someone check out what is colloquially known as Rocky Mountain
>BASIC, put out by Hewlett-Packard for their 68000-based machines.  I used it
>extensively a long time ago, at a company far far away.  It's an excellent
>BASIC interpreter with excellent manuals, and it runs *fast*.  It ran like
>blazes on an 8 MHz 68000.

Not only that, it has/had extensions which made it nice to use for
data acquisition and lab instrument control (using HPIB [GPIB/IEEE-4888] bus)
and a modicum of real-time features, which might fit in quite nicely with
other recent products for the Amiga (eh, Perry?).  It's losing now to
C, because so many more people are C-literate nowadays, so much of BASIC's
attraction as being useable by non-computerniks is becoming less important,
but for quickie lab tests & measurements it still beats the compile-link-debug
cycle for C.

I wonder if they might be talked into sharing some of the fruits of the
*large* investment they made in its development over the years.  And I
assure you, it's a *large* investment.

-- 
Eric Black	"Garbage in, Gospel out"
Atherton Technology, 1333 Bordeaux Dr., Sunnyvale, CA, 94089
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