X-no-Archive:yes
And your assumption was incorrect.  Whilst one CAN call intrinsics from
BASIC/3000, the results would be unusable.  I wrote a lot of code in
BASIC/3000 in the late 70s and very early 80s, and I had to write an SPL
interface for each intrinsic I wanted to call.  Thankfully HP supplied
BASIC-callable IMAGE intrinsics (XDBOPEN, XDBGET, XDBPUT, (precede the
intrinsic name with an X)), but any other intrinsic you wanted to call
needed a stub.  I believe the only exception was PAUSE which used a real
and that of course caused problems with COBOL.

The beauty of BASIC/3000 is that you could write code very quickly and test
it right there and then.  Once the code was proper, then you could compile
the whole thing and get very fast programs.

Migrating from BASIC/3000 to HP Business Basic was not a simple
straightforward task.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com



-----Original Message-----
From:   Therm-O-Link [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Tuesday, 02 February, 1999 12:44 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Replacing Software (Was: Trashed DB)

Tracy Johnson writes:

>At my job we've replaced Growthpower in a couple of places with CA-MANMAN.

Please note that I'm not picking on Growthpower in particular, I'm
just interested in seeing what you-all consider valid reasons for
replacing software.

>This is not a great technology leap, (HP BASIC to FORTRAN)

Funny, but I've never considered language as "technology" per se.
I always considered the language as the technology enabler.
I've been on some other computers where you had to use a certain
language if you wanted to do something esoteric (like muck about
in the file system), but most of them were similar to the HP3K:
System intrinsics are callable from any language.  Now, I don't
know a whole lot about HP Basic, but I am *assuming* (uh-oh!)
that it can call system intrinsics.  If so, then there should
be no technological barrier to using HP Basic for any application.

>but mainly to
>move to an application that works properly and is Y2K compliant.

Definitely valid reasons to move from one piece of software to
another, regardless of the language the software is written in.

Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]      Therm-O-Link, Inc.
Phone: (330) 527-2124                   P. O. Box 285
  Fax: (330) 527-2123                   Garrettsville, Ohio  44231