I would guess that the Business Basic (of which Thoroughbred has only a fairly small share) is roughly equivalent to he MV market.
Back in the early 80's, there was a Business Basic to Pick translator around. I don't clearly recall who developed it, but the name Jerry Burley (sp?) seems to stick in my mind. I worked on a system that had been converted from an older MAI Basic/4 system (MAI was the originator of the Business Basic language) to a Honeywell running Ultimate. The translator took what had been a fairly well written program and created some pretty awful code. For example, Business Basic does file I/O with a list of variables, whereby each field (attribute) is read into a separate variable. The translator converted reads and writes into a series of READV and WRITEV statements, one for each variable. Needless to say, performance was not real exciting. In fact, a report that used to take 4 hours to run on the old Basic/4 took 20 hours on the Honeywell. Of course, after I re-wrote it to take advantage of the MV data structures and intrinsic capabilities of the Ultimate system, it ran in 20 minutes. As I recall, this translator also had a (quite inefficient) B-Tree file manager, written entirely in Basic, since this was the days before alternate indices, etc. Quite a piece of work. All in all, I don't think there's a big market for Business Basic to U2 conversions. Especially since most of the modern Business Basics have full GUI and OO capabilities built in, albeit implemented in slightly different ways. On another note: someone earlier mentioned a Business Basic interpreter that ran on the Prime. The name of the product was BP99, from Chuck Armstrong (Armstrong System House). Larry Hiscock Western Computer Services -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Jordan Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 9:23 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [U2] "thoroughbred basic" Does anybody know the size of the thoroughbred basic market and does anyone have a feel how big a job it would be to convert sites to U2 and/or SB+ or one of the other tools out their. This could be an opportunity to grow the U2 camp. David Jordan ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
