From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!ucbvax!C70:info-cpm Newsgroups: fa.info-cpm Title: languages Article-I.D.: ucb.1274 Posted: Fri Jun 4 04:06:06 1982 Received: Sat Jun 5 02:17:26 1982 >From lauren@Ucla-Security Fri Jun 4 04:05:57 1982 Unfortunately, very few languages that are highly useful on small micros are also fully supported on larger machines... When was the last time you saw super-duper-basic-X running on a VAX or a PDP-11? More importantly, if there is *ever* to be any hope of porting programs to different machines, the language chosen must require as *few* "exciting new" extensions as possible. Most of the semi-usable BASICs would seem to fail this test, as do most existing Pascals. Even C has its problems in this regard, though the effort tends to be relatively minor since *most* C standard I/O implementations are very similar, if not identical, in most respects. LISP seems out of place on small machines, due largely to the space limitations that have been mentioned before. I suspect that the real winner is, you guessed it: FORTRAN. Blechh. But it *is* portable. Personally, I still stick with C... Especially with Leor's newer versions of the compiler, it is getting pretty trivial to port C programs to and from BDS C. .. --Lauren-- P.S. Except in special situations, I would generally consider any language that doesn't have some type of structure mechanism to be unsuitable for all but simple, quick and dirty type programs. That is not to say that many programs are *not* quick and dirty, however... --LW--