#: 5231 S15/Hot Topics
    15-Jul-90  13:03:42
Sb: #4997-#Is Basic out of date?
Fm: JOHN TEAGUE 75715,1670
To: Paul K. Ward 73477,2004

Paul, QuickBasic is an outstanding implementation.  BASIC09 is somewhere in
between GW-BASIC and BASIC09--IMHO.  As I said in my earlier message, QB is
being bundled by Microsoft with version 5.0 of MS-DOS.  Some time ago I read
comments by Bill Gates in a magazine that BASIC would become a super powerful
batch language. Apparently, he feels that he has to get zillions of copies of
it out there to achieve that objective and I suspect he is right.  I can
remember wondering when I first used ms-dos why .BAT files were necessary at
all when BASIC was available, but I suspect that was because Microsoft bought
MS-DOS and .BAT processing was already built in. There are three areas where QB
represents an improvement over GW-BASIC (which, for purposes of this
discussion, we can consider roughly equivalent to RS-BASIC.):
  1). Runtime
  2). Language extensions
  3). Development Environment

The most wonderful is the development environment, but to take them in order:
RUNTIME The runtime code is fully compiled and therefore quite fast. Basic09,
of course, is pretty fast, too but uses a semi-compiled i-code.  In QB, the
developer can choose to compile and link so that no runtime module is required.
This simplifies running the program for the end user and you can distribute
your object module to any user who has MS-DOS.  Or the developer can compile
and link the same source so that a run time module is also required.  This
approach produces a smaller object module and saves disk space when you have
several programs that can share the runtime.  This runtime is more a collection
of executable modules like inkey than an interpreter like runb.  In any event,
you can obtain a license to distribute the runtime. Of course, all OS9 level II
users have runb because BASIC09 comes with level II.  I've forgotten what it's
like to have level 1.


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