First of all, to Tampax: I guess that everybody else got what I meant. Creating a basic program usually is less type work and is faster.

Lets begin with the memory and code bloat issues. My aeon old Pentium 4 1.8GhZ workstation is idle 99% of the time when I am doing email, spreadsheet, email or even Microsoft Photo Viewer. So, the time saved there is unimportant – I meant that there simply are parts of the program where it doesnt pay out to go for speed!As said, for a kernel it pays…but not for a lonesome GUI widget.

Many of you wrote about the advanced features that C can do. I fully agree that C can do much, much more than VB – but it always is a question if you really need it. When I got my Treo 600, I also felt that I couldnt miss out on the HiRes screen and xSCALE cpu. But tada, the T3 is at home now – I used it maybe 5 minutes a day!SO, for a program where you need ther advanced stuff do C by all means – but IMHO, not blindly!

Once again a big thank you to all of you(yes, you too, Tampax)!
Best regards
Tam Hanna

P.s. Had to fire up a notepad instance to write that..woohoo!

You can’t put a Type definition after a Class that uses it only in half-moon nights when the system is using an outdated OLE32AUT DLL version? WTF?
What the heck is a form? An object? A reference to an object? A type? A STRING?????? IN FACT IT IS ALL OF THEM!!!
Why it does not have Option Explicit enabled by default?
Why the **** ByVal does not clone certain classes objects but instead does clone certain Type definitions?
Destructors are called wenever the runtime wants to — including ‘never’.
Its mind-fscking array declaration syntax still leaves me confused. When I declare an array, I am setting the upper bound or the element count? Or it depends on an Option Base setting which can be hidden wherever the coder wants to?

VB6 and previous versions are usually maintainers’ hell. I hate it.

HB++ is good, anyway. It’s RAD — but it’s not nonsense. You can even develop an assembler & linker with it. (I did it once just for fun), do lots of bitwise, pointers, and low-level operations and also you can UNDERSTAND what it does behind its useful class library. (It has flaws, too).

Response1, Basic is not RAD. VB is. Java with a good toolkit and a visual designer is, too. C++, given a good object library can also work as a RAD.
Response2, yep, speed is a commodity until you notice that your mapping application takes a few minutes to display a single 640×480 map page, because VB6 floating point operations are still slow in a 2Ghz CPU.
Response3, I agree, case-sensitivity sucks.
Response4. Teaching BASIC is not really that faster. If you don’t teach any of the C features that BASIC does not have, teaching C can be as fast as teaching Basic. I.e. just teach “pointers” as a replacement to MID$.
However, teaching VB is, of course, a lot faster than teaching ANSI C.

BTW, Dijkstra was wrong. You can be a good coder whatever language you’re using. I.E. You can be a good OO coder even if you’re using plain C.

Problems arrive when languages allow you to do funky things that work randomly.

I hope I’ve written this properly.

Edsger Dijkstra

Cheers,
aldweb

“Basic is RAD”

Only someone who is new to programming and does not know the difference between an IDE and a compiler can write such nonesense.

A few things:
1) 1kb of memory DOES matter, ESPECIALLY on palms and the like
2) It most certainly does matter whether something is executed in 0.0001 or 0.001 seconds. That can be the difference between a fast program and a slow one… and people do not like slow programs.
3) BASIC is faster to write with… but it isn’t nearly as functional. And VB just isn’t practical to use for most projects.
4) And for the record, C/C++ still is the “king of the world”. The vast majority of all modern computer programs and operating systems are written in C/C++. BASIC has not been a serious programmer’s platform since the days when PCs natively ran DOS. VB simply doesn’t have the potential, and Java is only useful for web applications (while japa apps can be converted into executable applications, they run VERY VERY slowly compared to their C/C++ counterparts).

I think BASIC is great for introducing programming to the young people.

Cheers,
aldweb