[Info-vax] General Availability of 9.2 for x86-64

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/16/2022 10:02 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 7/16/22 09:52, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 7/16/2022 8:35 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 7/16/22 01:00, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>> On 7/15/2022 10:33 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>> A bigger question would be other than Dave how much of the VMS
>>>>> application base still uses BASIC.   :-)
>>>>
>>>> A decent indicator of that is Clair Grant saying a while back that 
>>>> there would
>>>> always be a Basic compiler on VMS, or, something to that effect. 
>>>> Perhaps he
>>>> has a better feel for the user base?
>>>
>>> Probably true, but you have to admit that in a world where COBOL
>>> (the first serious business programming language) is considered
>>> dead and languages like Fortran, Pascal and even Ada don't even
>>> rate a mention in a CS degree program it is pretty funny that a
>>> children's programming language best known for things like the
>>> TRS-80 and VIC-20 is still in use.
>>
>> "children's programming language best known for things like the
>> TRS-80 and VIC-20"
>>
>> I'm not sure that you intended that to be derogatory, or just your 
>> opinion, but the Basic Plus language produced by EG&H was not the same 
>> as some Basic languages.  It had many good features, and, was quite 
>> adequate for business programming, and other uses.  The name may be 
>> shared, but the implementations were very different.  As DEC Basic, 
>> and follow-ons, it has only gotten better.
> 
> So did COBOL.  And what did that get it?

Cobol has evolved original -> 74 -> 85 -> OO additions, but
I think it is still the same language.

The many flavors of Basic share the name and only a very short list
of common  syntactical items (*) but are otherwise very different
languages.

 From the very primitive Dartmouth Basic, GW-Basic etc. to
pretty advanced VMS Basic, VB6, VBS etc. to full multi-paradigm
VB.NET.

Arne

*) What does all known Basic variants share syntax wise? Case
    insensitive, goto, for next loop. Anything else?