Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!wasatch!uplherc!esunix!bambam!bpendlet From: bpendlet@bambam.UUCP (Bob Pendleton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: TrueBASIC (was Re: EZ-DOS, MS-DOS compatible OS) Message-ID: <125@bambam.UUCP> Date: 14 Aug 89 18:06:57 GMT References: <14980@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> Organization: Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp., Salt Lake City, Utah Lines: 34 From article <14980@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>, by stevel@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Steve Ligett): > Whoa, I thought that Turbo BASIC and Microsoft's QuickBasic were ANSI, or > ANSI-like. True BASIC is NOT like the old (PC or GW) BASIC. Thank > goodness. They do include a "converter" that might be useful in > changing PC-BASIC to True BASIC. The question is; which ANSI Basic? There is ANSI BASIC, which TrueBASIC implements. And, there is ANSI Minimal BASIC. ANSI Minimal BASIC is a subset of GWBasic. Or maybe I should say that in the process of creating GWBasic, microsoft BASIC was extended so that it included all of ANSI Minimal BASIC as a subset. IMNSHO (In My Not So Humble Opinion) ANSI BASIC is a respectable applications programming language. It actually improves on Dartmouth BASIC. Dartmouth BASIC was, for its time, a very nice application programming language/environment. It is nice to see some good, compiled, implementations of BASIC hitting the street. Thoughs of us who learned BASIC on mainframes were very surprised to find that microcomputer BASICs were interpreted. When I learned BASIC a good sized mainframe had a megabyte of ram, a 1 mip processor, and maybe as much as 100 megs of disk. Bob P. -- Bob Pendleton, speaking only for myself. UUCP Address: decwrl!esunix!bpendlet or utah-cs!esunix!bpendlet Reality is stanger than most people can imagine