mkhaw@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Mike Khaw) (02/20/88)
Many weeks back, I posted a message asking for recommendations for a
BASIC for the Mac. I got about a dozen responses, mostly in favor of
the MS-BASIC interpreter, and a few in favor of ZBASIC. One respondent,
who is an Apple employee but NOT speaking as an Apple representative,
thought that the ZBASIC documentation was not well done and the dialect
too non-standard. Others found ZBASIC fast and easy to program in.
No one mentioned True BASIC, but that's what I ended up buying because
they had a Mac Expo special, $25 for version 1.2. For purposes of learning
BASIC, it is more that adequate. It has modern structured programming
constructs, long variable names, named subroutines, doesn't require line
numbers, etc., but also allows old-style line-numbered coding. It comes
with a machine-independent language reference manual and a Mac-specific
users guide. There is some support for the Mac Toolbox, but you need to
buy a developer's toolkit for full access, and a runtime package to produce
double-clickable applications.
The only gripe I have about True 1.2 is that it doesn't run under MultiFinder.
All 3 BASICs are normally discounted to about $65 (I'm excluding the MS-BASIC
compiler, which is significantly costlier).
Mike Khaw
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