JG> I think the devotion to an arbitrary standard, which is currently under
JG> review anyway, 

Regardless of whether it is or not, which I don't know, creating a new
version of the standard every 8 years is not a bad thing.

JG> is taken much too far by some programmers. The end result is
JG> invariably fatware, which runs very slowly. Windows is a very good example.

What a load of rubbish.  FREQ "TOBRUK" from 3:711/934, and you'll
get a mailprocessor that is 4 times faster than the most popular
mailprocessor in use today, yet is portable to practically any environment
with a C compiler.

JG> BTW, using Basic it's always been very easy to port most programs from
JG> one machine to another, yet it's not hogtied by any standards. Haven't we
JG> all done such porting when we first learned Basic?

What another complete load of rubbish.  YOU have obviously never attempted
to port Basic.  I just had a look at what BASIC programs I have, and I have
GORILLA.BAS, which came with DOS.  What chance do you think there is that
that will run on the C64's version of basic?  Or vice-versa.  There's not a
portable bit of basic code ever been written.  They tried to make a
standard, so that it COULD be ported, called Ansi Minimal Basic.  No-one
ever uses it, because the only portable subset of Basic is completely
unusable. Just like Pascal mostly is in fact.  BFN.  Paul.
@EOT:

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