warner@orca.UUCP (Ken Warner) (03/19/84)
I am a new delegate to X3J2, the committee working on the ANSI standard for Basic. Because I was not present when the design of the syntax that describes the graphics capabilities of Basic being discussed, I am trying too get a perspective on the validity of including graphics as part of the ANSI standard for Basic. The proposed ANSI standard for Basic has included as part of the language syntax an approximate binding to a subset of level 0b of GKS. I am especially interested in the validity of including a binding to a subset of GKS as part of the language. Comments on the following questions would be helpful in giving me a perspective on these issues. The following questions for graphics people: 1) How many implementations of GKS exist? 2) How many sites are actually using an implementation of GKS. 3) Will the evolution of computer graphics make GKS obsolete? How soon? 4) Are there other (better?) graphics interfaces being developed. 5) Is level 0b a large enough subset to be useful? The following are for compiler writters: 1) If you were implementing ANSI Basic, how would you implement the binding to GKS. Would you: a) Write level 0b from scratch? b) Cannibalize an existing implementation? The following are for applications writers. 1) If you were writing a graphics application would you rely only on the graphics capabilities built into Basic or would you use other graphics packages? 2) If you were writing a graphics application would you use GKS? I realize comments to these questions will be mostly speculative but will be useful to me and perhaps useful to X3J2. Please mail me direct and as always.. thanks in advance. Ken Warner ..tektronix!tekecs!warner