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

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:13:03 -0500, "Stephen J. Rush"
<sjrush@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>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.

Too bad about your budget - PDS was so much better than 4.5 in a
couple of very significant areas, mostly having to do with libraries,
subroutine calls and data storage.  It also had something funny about
the FP stuff - can't remember exactly, and it was in an obscure part
of the manual.

>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.

In Freebasic, what do you use for a graphics library?  I took a look
at it a while back an gave up when I couldn't decide how to do the 2D
vector graphics.  I also didn't notice that the IDE was any good at
all for debugging, only fro writing programs, like an editor.