I never had the Borland compiler; progs done with the old M$ "QB 4/4.5"
though do run nicely and really fast on Pentiums. However, that "QB"
produced bloaty code (btw, some sources for the v4.5 are still there
at abandonware places, only M$ doesn't sell it any more), and was
hopeless with bitwise operations and a lot of hardware-near tasks.
I recently bought the Power Basic compiler which indeed gets over the
DOS-mem hurdle and delivers lightning fast and compact code - the same
prog.s, after porting (though there are a number of nitty-gritty things
to do, and very manually) have about the third of the footprint and an
unmeasurable speed of execution. Seen the enormous treasure of freely
available algorithms in the Basic world, and - thanks Linux - the
opening-up of important hardware specifications, DOS'n'Basic seems not
at all a dead-end road.
And when it comes to text/string handling (i.e., The Net), Basic as
language is still superior, definitely. [My 0.02 US$$$, equiv.]
ps - I dearly appreciated Bob Deering's remark on a language a computer
would understand ('... correct. This would mean "not C", among other
things.') <bg>
// Heimo Claasen // < hammer at inti dot be > // Brussels 2000-11-07
The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.inti.be/hammer
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