Microsoft Says New BASIC Is for Serious Developers
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Microsoft last week rolled out its new development system for
BASIC programmers and claims this version will meet the needs of
serious developers. The new BASIC Professional Development System
7.0 ($495), consisting of 12 disks and 2250 pages of
documentation (the full-fledged system takes up nearly 14
megabytes of hard-disk space), incorporates Microsoft's threaded
p-code technology (first used in QuickBASIC 4.0) and an
integrated ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) "engine" that
lets programmers manipulate multi-index and multi-table data
files that are up to 128 megabytes in size.
 
BASIC Professional 7.0 also provides tools for designing user
interfaces, with prewritten code for pull-down menus, multiple
windows, dialog boxes, and mouse support. And because Microsoft
thinks most BASIC programmers often have to roll their own
graphing applications, the company has included a Presentation
Graphics Toolbox that has primitives for business-oriented charts
and graphs.
 
For developers of large BASIC applications, Microsoft's expanded
the capacity of BASIC Professional in two ways. There's now EMS
(Expanded Memory) support for user code and arrays, as well as
extended memory support for the BASIC run-time module. Also new
is a "no frills" switch that loads a bare bones development
environment. The bottom line is that programmers can develop
applications in BASIC 7.0 as large as 16 megabytes. That's about
50 times larger than what's possible with QuickBASIC 4.5.
 
The company claims it has decreased the size of a finished
executable file by about 68 percent over QuickBASIC. The company
also claims finished programs run up to 19 times faster than with
QuickBASIC 4.5.
 
Research done by Microsoft shows that there are at least 250,000
professional programmers who do their development primarily in
BASIC, said Tom Button, program manager of Microsoft's Languages
Group. (Microsoft itself doesn't do any system or applications
development in BASIC and "doesn't hire BASIC programmers," he
said.) Those programmers primarily spend their time on
specialized vertical business applications.
 
Contact: Microsoft, 16011 Northeast 36th Way, Box 97017,
Redmond, WA 98073; (206) 882-8080.
 
                              --- Stan Miastkowski
 
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