I can't believe I'm playing in the flame-baiting sandbox, but what the heck.
My basic position is that if you only know one language, you haven't begun to explore the space. Arguing passionately for a single language means either 1) you make your money from that language or 2) you haven't explored enough. On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 20:19, Ron Nicholson wrote: > The 70's versions of BASIC (and Forth) were designed for small > devices (when you needed to develop programs on the device). > BASIC ran on 8k Altairs and 16k Apple II's, no C compiler could. > cBasPad (the predecessor to HotPaw Basic) ran on a Pilot 1000. > Where is the non-kludge C development system that ran on a > Pilot 1000? Not to put too fine a point on it, but does it matter? My first Palm was a palm professional, but that's ancient history these days. While I'd be interested to hear about percentage of users still using ancient Palms, I don't think it's a major concern for most developers who pick a base line and develop for that (I'd expect OS 2.0 or 3.0 as a minimum, these days...perhaps 3.5 for games). I can't remember the last time I saw (outside my office) a Palm earlier than a palm III. > Small handheld devices are also personal devices; and Basic > was designed as a language for people to use (as opposed to > programmers :^) All languages were developed for people. Try hand-compiling assembly to machine code. I did it back during the Sinclair zx80 days. Ugh! Even assembly language translators (assemblers) are for people. Now, I tend to attempt to go for the appropriate language to get the "optimum" balance between productivity and speed. Somewhere between 68K assembly and C, for me...but I've been a card carrying geek (tete d'ampoule) for a while now. Others will swear by C++, onboardC, pocketC, pascal variants, or other languages. The bottom line is that anyone who only thinks in one language is limiting their options. These days where there're so many language opportunities on the Palm, that's a real shame and kinda pathetic. > >Requiring a ~100K (99594 byte) runtime module is > >counter-productive. > > The runtimes are this large to provide lots of library features. > IIRC, the original runtime for cBasPad was under 16k. The > Appforge runtime is larger than the HotPaw Basic runtime > because it has more features. Feh. If it makes sense, provide a 100K runtime. What's the difference between a runtime and a data file to the end user? The AppForge 1MB runtime seems excessive to me, but not to the guys who use it to keep their jobs. Personally, I prefer to release my programs as C compiled code on Palms because that feels like the most "efficient" way to do it. For someone else, who knows? As long as it works, hits the target space, and keeps them from being fired, bully for them. > Forth programmers used to claim something like this; but if you > examined their programs, they ended up reinventing large portions > of the runtime for any full featured application. I've written forth programs too. Heck, even wrote my own forth for the Atari ST. One of the tenets of forth is that if you're not rewriting all code, it's inefficient because you don't know what it's doing, or how it's doing it. I didn't believe that truly, until I wrote my 'roids game. *Then* I realised how much more efficient purpose-built code can be than general purpose code...and how much more efficient raw assembly can be than C. Note that I still write the vast majority of my code in C, and then assemble the stuff that's speed crucial. > George Henne writes: > > There really isn't any such thing as standard Basic. > > ANSI Standard for Minimal BASIC (X3.60-1978) [...] > uncommon and obsolete, but a "Standard" in the legal sense. The best thing about standards are that there's so many to choose from...(and they never seem tom completely apply to the products that are out there). -Ken -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
