david@ecrhub.UUCP (David M. Haynes) (09/12/85)
A young friend of mine came to me the other day very upset with the book
"Introduction to Macintosh Basic" by Scot Kamins (Full details at bottom
of message)
She was trying to do a small programming task under Basic as
part of her homework assignment (yes that young!) The idea was to program
the "animal" game (where the computer learns about more and more animals
as you progress) and to have the data file of animals stored on disk.
She had purchased this book to help her learn programming.
Does the book talk about FILE IO at all???? It does not!
Does Macintosh Basic Support FILE IO??? It does!!!
So, what is going on here? Surely no-one is naive enough to assume that
no-one wants to ever store data! Its incredible!
After thumbing through this turkey myself I also noticed that there is no
summary of the Basic commands either!
The full reference for this work ($27.00 CDN) is as follows:
Kamins, Scot
Introduction to Macintosh BASIC
(c) 1984 ISBN 0-8104-6550-7
Hayden Book Company (Apple Press)
p.s. Anyone want to send me the full FILE IO commands for Microsoft Basic?
Thanks!
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
David M. Haynes
Exegetics Inc.
..!utzoo!ecrhub!david
Exegetics Inc. is a legal convience and does not care what I have to say.
Emerald City Research Inc. is very kind to let me use their machine, but
in no way is even remotely responsible for the stuff I post.tdn@spice.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Thomas Newton) (09/20/85)
Macintosh BASIC is not the same as Microsoft BASIC. It is a different product
that Apple was working on, but I have heard that it will never see the light
of day (Apple gave Microsoft the rights to crucial parts of it in return for
an extension to their license to produce Applesoft BASIC ROMs). One of its
features was the ability to run several BASIC programs at once. I don't know
how good or bad the book that you bought actually is, but it's not appropriate
to flame it because it doesn't describe MS-BASIC -- that isn't its purpose!!!
Anyone want to compute the odds that any Apple product that competes strongly
with a Microsoft product will never see the light of day? Consider:
* the relative utility of memory-based MacWrite and WORD on a 128K Mac
(restricting the comparison to text storage ability)
* the amount of time that it took Apple to bring out disk-based MacWrite
(which is still considerably less powerful than WORD)
* the sale of key portions of Macintosh BASIC to Microsoft, after it was
ALREADY COMPLETED and publishers had sunk time & money into producing
books about it.
As to a list of file I/O commands: if you have a legitimate copy of MS-BASIC,
you should also have a reference manual which lists all of the commands. If
you are using a school's copy of MS-BASIC on the school's computer, you should
ask them to loan you the documentation.
-- Thomas.Newton@spice.cs.cmu.edu