Re: Why use Basic at all? (was Re: BASIC with built-in matrix

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:37:10 -0400, Happy Trails wrote:

> The thing I liked about it so much was that even running in the IDE
> anything you wrote was almost as fast as the compiled versions.  While
> it was true you cold slow it down a lot if you wanted to, by putting
> in debugging stuff, just the code, traceable in source in case it
> bombed, was almost as fast as the compiled version.
> 
> I used to run real time navigation stuff, and machine shop motor
> controllers, with PDS Basic running in the IDE so I could change
> things around a bit while doing actual production.  Who would try that
> today with so-called "modern" tools?

QuickBasic 4.5 (I couldn't afford PDS) had a gotcha: programs running in
the IDE would use a floating-point unit if you had one, but if you
compiled the program from the IDE, it would use the emulation library.  On
a 3-GHz box, it
might not make much of a difference, but on a 33-MHz 486 it drove me nuts
until until I read everything in the manual about compiling and linking
and discovered that you had to compile from the command line, with a
linker switch that was mentioned *once* in the manual, to use the FPU. 
Then I found that even with that switch, a standalone .exe wasn't
significantly faster than running from the IDE.  I think the IDE actually
did a compile-and-go, retaining the tokenized source only for debugging,
rather than interpreting the source as GW-Basic did.

Now I use FreeBASIC, which is what QuickBasic would have evolved into if
Microsoft hadn't drank the Kool-Aid and danced off to Visual Land. In
Linux it has no really good IDE, just some syntax-highlighting editors. In
Windows there is an IDE that's almost as nice as QuickBasic, but it's not
quite enough to make me reboot into Windows.