steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) (01/31/89)
Since we have an Ashton-Tate programmer with us, can you tell us why the ability to redirect @,say output to a file, which was present in dBASE II, was not preserved in dBASE III+? I wrote many programs in II which I had to tediously rewrite when I moved them to III+ for this reason. (Of course, I had to tediously rewrite many other parts of my code, too. I'm still programming in both II and III+ on different machines--believe it or not, many CP/M machines are still in productive use.) This loss of functionality, however, is the most annoying of the changes I've come across. Steve Goldfield
awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas) (02/01/89)
You can direct @..SAYs to a file, printer or screen in dBASE IV. I'm not sure why the ability was not present in dBASE III, but I was hired around the time III was written and I know that the original two or three dBASE II authors were outnumbered by the five or six people, like me, who didn't know the details of dBASE but were hired to help rewrite it in C. The core programmers that wrote dBASE IV have a lot more history with dBASE and its users and we're more sensitive, I think. We're all hard at work on an even better dBASE IV right now. If there's anything else that bothers anyone about dBASE, please post it. I hear a lot of "dBASE is buggy" or "dBASE is slow" which are rather hard to substantiate, let alone do anything about. A lot of product acceptance seems to turn on feelings and attitudes instead of technical merit--I'm sure there are lots of good programming editors, for example, but I like mine too much to consider them. Looking at the numbers, though, dBASE is turning into a COBOL* that's going to be around forever--Ashton-Tate estimates that there are 5 million people using the dBASE language, making it the second most popular computer language in history. I think some future version of dBASE is going to give you the kind of "real DBMS" power you want, but in a dBASE context. If you expect to use DBMS software for a while, here's your chance to influence its development. /alastair/ These opinions are mine; Ashton-Tate doesn't know I'm on UseNet. *This is not to imply that dBASE is or is not a generic public domain language--I don't care to express an opinion on that at this time.