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