mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) (06/13/91)
phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Phil Howard KA9WGN) writes: > tml@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Tim Long) writes: > >1) To have a freely available general purpose interpretive language on > >UNIX systems. (As opposed to the many more special purpose ones such > >as awk and the shell). This can be re-phrased as: To have a UNIX > >language like DOS has BASIC. > > First thing I do after installing DOS on a PC is find BASIC and erase it. Same here. In fact, since the BASIC supplied with this machine was on a separate disk, I didn't even bother to install it in the first place. Microsoft has now announced Visual BASIC, a mutant BASIC with Windows. This strikes me as being just what the world did NOT need. The Atari ST has a number of BASICs similar in concept to Visual BASIC, and in my experience the PD GEM programs written in BASIC are klunky, unreliable, and suffer from bizarre user-interface weirdness. Until now, PD Windows 3.0 programs have mostly been of fairly good quality. I confidently predict that Visual BASIC will change that. mathew