Re: Larkin, Power BASIC cannot be THAT good:

On Sun, 24 May 2009 01:21:09 -0500, AZ Nomad
<aznomad.3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 23 May 2009 20:50:09 -0700, John Larkin <jjSNIPlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 23 May 2009 21:26:36 -0500, AZ Nomad
<aznomad.3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 23 May 2009 19:11:42 -0700, John Larkin <jjSNIPlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is a fundamental difference between goto and gosub. It is an
important one, subroutine invocation saves time and code space without
the biggest problems of goto.

But GOTO is faster than GOSUB.

You can make a very nice state machine with an ON..GOTO (or equivalent
CASE...GOTO) structure that dispatches to a number of snippets, each
of which does its thing ends with a GOTO back to the top of the state
dispatcher. Works like a trained pig.

Unless you're running a processor running in the single digit megahertz,
programmer development time, code reliability and maintainability are
far more important than raw speed. It hardly matters if a subroutine finishes
in 0.0015ms instead of 0.0012 ms when the process being monitored takes 5ms.

BASIC is a shitty language because no two implementations are compatible.
Everything with named variables, constructs, code blocks, parameter passing,
if/then/else, case statements, etc. required proprietary extensions.


Do I have to give all the money back?

Nah. Just learn a completely new proprietary langauge every time you try
BASIC with a different vendor.

I use PowerBasic for Windows apps. Why would I change vendors?

If you program C++/.NET, or C#, your programs won't be very portable.
If you're careful and a little lucky, you can write Java programs that
almost work the same under Windows and Linux.

I'm not a programmer, but I do need to program engineering problems.
PowerBasic (the console compiler, not the real Windows thing) is fast
and works well. These programs don't need to be portable... all I need
them to do is to keep running under future revs of Windows. All my old
16-bit PowerBasic/DOS programs seem to work fine under XP, even the
graphics. Only serial i/o is flakey, so we migrate them to PBCC, tghe
32-bit version, which does serial and TCP/IP just fine.

"Real" windows programming wastes too much effort on the user
interface.

John

.