Mike Hornsby writes:

> BASIC/V forever!
>
>  Is their anything we can do to get BASIC/V and the other subsystems
included
>  in MPE/iX FOS?

I have been quietly bugging people for a couple of years now to allow us to
distribute and "support" BASIC/V, especially now that the product seems to be
in limbo.

There is no copy protection associated with BASIC or its compiler, so they
can be downloaded and installed on any HP3000 with surprising ease. Further,
I consider CM's CISC code to be an amazingly intelligent compression
algorithm, designed with enormous foresight for internet transfers. BASIC is
only about a megabyte, so it takes only 1/15th the amount of time to download
that a standard browser no requires.

As Gavin said recently, there are probably more large applications written on
the HP3000 in BASIC/V than PASCAL -- and at one time, probably more than
COBOL. It is an extremely simple, highly efficient language in which to write
IMAGE applications, particularly input screens. The QCTerm-driven talk that I
gather Mike watched was written in BASIC/V, running only in interpreted mode.
Although the SLIDES program could be sped up by 40 times if it were compiled,
and another 30% on top of that if it were OCTCOMP'ed, the program puts such a
light load on the HP3000 as it is that I didn't feel that it was necessary.

When I say that we would be pleased to "support" BASIC/V, all I really mean
is that we would be pleased to translate all of the manuals into PDF and
place them -- and the BASIC/V & Compile object code -- on our web site so
that people could download them.

BASIC/V hasn't been modified in years, but there's a lot of value in that. It
has proven itself to be an extremely stable language that doesn't depend or
change with every new release of the operating system.

And don't let anyone tell you that it doesn't generate efficient code; 30
years ago, efficiency was everything, so it tends to generate clean,
efficient code. But more importantly, the primary use of a language like
BASIC is in generating IMAGE-based applications. While giving away BASIC for
free certainly won't earn CSY any money -- and may actually forestall people
paying for more expensive languages that are on the corporate price list --
having BASIC in the hands of as many people as possible is something that
would do the HP3000 an enormous amount of good. Applications development is
everything at the moment, and the more people participating in that the
better.

Wirt Atmar