Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!mandrill!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Fish Disk #13 and AmigaBasic Summary: Here, here!, Leo Message-ID: <831@neoucom.UUCP> Date: 8 Dec 87 14:32:27 GMT References: <42600011@uicsrd> <4649@well.UUCP> Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 44 AmigaBasic?, we don't need no steenking AmigaBasic. I agree with Leo. The Metacomco ABasiC sold with the A100 was (is?) a pretty good interpreter. While, it doesn't have the the fancy-shmancy windows of AmigaBasic, I don't ever recall ABasiC visiting the Guru for no particular reason the way AmigaBaic does. The other thing that makes ABaiC worth the bother is that it doesn't handle SER: the brain-damaged way AmigaBasic does. Not having the patience yet to endure the do { edit_text(); compile_program(); test_idea(); } while (1); loop of developing a recent idea, i decided that it might be quicker to work out the design in Basic. Being a product of the Video Genreation, I need to have immediate feedback. What I was working out was a Midi librarian. Mostly for personal interest to see how to use wonderful system-exclusive stuff. I couldn't do it in AmigaBasic, since darn Amigabasic strips off anything that ain't printable ASCII from strings going to SER:. AmigaBasic aslo doesn't belive that baud rates higher than 9600 exist either. ABasiC believes the baud rate set in Preferences. I booted up ABasic under KS/WB 1.2, and sure enuf, it worked. I didn't try absolutely everything since all I cared about was the serial port, and I got my 31.5 Kbaud necessary for dealing with the midi connection. ABasic also keeps its grubby mits off the stuff you are sending to the port. The only glitch is that SER: queues up blocks of 512 characters on incoming data. If I get a chance, I'll give the recently posted AUX: device a shot, since that is single character oriented. Once again, Microsoft proves it can write large buggy language products :-). --Bill