Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!shelby!csli!jkl
From: jkl@csli.Stanford.EDU (John Kallen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Who uses BASIC these days (for serious application writing)
Message-ID: <8900@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 10 May 89 02:15:29 GMT
References: <11581@well.UUCP>
Sender: jkl@csli.Stanford.EDU (John Kallen)
Reply-To: jkl@csli.stanford.edu (John Kallen)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 45

In article <11581@well.UUCP> rchao@well.UUCP writes:
>
>So I was wondering, do you all know many companies or organizations
>that use BASIC, and what is their rationale? Just simpler to code?
>What about the generally chaotic nature of the language? Is is mostly
>"structured" BASICs that are used?
>

The company I've worked for every summer since 1983 has a large
Economic software package written in BASIC. The reason why is simple:
in the early 80's, the only languages available in CP/M were COBOL,
PL/I, BASIC and assembler. COBOL and PL/I were ruled out because they
were too big, and assembler was ruled out because it would have been
such a pain to port it over to different machines. When the IBM PC was
released, they could quickly move over to the MS-DOS environment, as
Digital Research (who wrote the compiler they were using) had a 8086
BASIC compiler out. These days, they're still programming new code in
BASIC for the IBM PC/XT/AT/386 clones, simply because the code's
always been BASIC. However, they are in the process of translating
their Mbytes of source code from BASIC to C as part of their motion
towards UNIX.

The BASIC they're using is Digital Research CBasic (CB80 or CB86, depending
on the machine/OS). It is semi-structured, although in my opinion not
structured enough. Their move to C has been a troubled one and is taking
much more time than they originally thought. They tried using
Minnow Bear's MB86 program to translate their BASIC to C but it failed.
Their programs were simply too big for the MB86 translator. Now they
are translating the code by hand, which not only is slow, but 
re-introduces heaps of new bugs....

BASIC is fine on toy machines like CP/M boxes and PC's, but it's not
portable to UNIX and will cause you grief if you try to port it. Morale:
Avoid BASIC like leprosy....

>R. Chao
>Oakland, CA

I couldn't mail this to you, so I posted instead. My apologies for wasted
bandwidth.
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