A Salon web/magazine article by David Brin about kids, learning
to programming in Basic, and how an easy-to-use version doesn't
come with every personal computer, as was so a couple decades
ago.

Warning, this Salon link required me to click thru a bunch of ads:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/

In the Salon letters section (which doesn't have the annoying
advertising click-thru), he got several hundred replies, some of
which mention several of our Basic implementations:

http://letters.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/view/

And at least 2 new Basic implementations were developed in
response to Mr. Brin's article:
Quite Basic and Basic 256 (formerly KidsBasic).

IMHO. YMMV.

Ex-employee encrypted/password protected webserver. I need to extract
data from current webserver. The only method currently is to manually
enter;:

http://www.autodistributor.com/view_Entity.asp?EntityID=XXXXX

'XXXXX' is the part # that you enter(00001 - 99999) and it displays
Part Info and Vendor Contact info. It also gives you an option to
create a vCard (Outlook) and either open or save it locally.

One option is to manually enter the part# and manually click on vCard
link and save it. I can then at least export out to a format I can use
to help move to a new server. I can also print screen and save and use
SnagIt to format the data to a csv file.

What I would really like to find is a utility or method to automate the
above. Anyone have any ideas, please reply. I do not think they are
going to get the information to get into the server from the
ex-employee, since it is rumoured he left the country.

DBA/Networks by nature and do not have any web dev background.

Thanks

ER

Yep. Conventional basic is easier on the eyes and more understandable
:-)

New version available on the Chipmunk Basic web site:

http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic

The MacOSX disk image included both GUI and Terminal applications
for both Intel and PPC. The linux/x86 zip file contains a binary
executable
plus a man page. The linux build has been used for web CGI.

Recent change notes (3.6.3b0):

- Added a few beta test sdbm database commands
- Added a couple beta test X11 graphics commands to the linux build
- Fixed a colon before subroutine name bug
- Fixed fn math$() bug in MacOS X Intel build
- Fixed midi sounds and midi input in MacOS X Intel build
- Fixed macfunction "putstr2clip" bug

Other prior recent changes:

The following benchmark is a version of one from Byte Magazine
circa 1982 and 1983. I changed the loops parameter to make it
easier to time on todays much faster machines. Set it so that the
benchmark runs at least 10 seconds; and report the elapsed time
divided by the number of loops ran. I've measured times ranging
from over 3 minutes (Applesoft on an Apple ][+) to well under
0.1 milliseconds per loop.

Just for the heck of it, and for the (possible) interest of people who
use simple computers and BASICs, I wrote a more-or-less generic version
of that Julian Day and Gregorian Date interconverter that I posted here
a few days ago. I cut out almost all the comments and "bells and
whistles". Also, I made it so it doesn't need double-precision
variables or "long" integers. In fact, it uses only single-precision
floating-point numbers for all the variables, except for a few strings.
In order to do this, I had to make the numbers smaller than real Julian
Day numbers. Basically, I subtracted two million from the Julian Days,
and faked the numbers by prefixing a "2" when a Julian Day is printed
out. This works just fine, but means that the date can't be after the
year 3500, which is just...

news@rtrussell.co.uk

100%% agreed.

Nowadays, when it comes to UI, ease of use of the IDE
and libraries come first, and it makes no difference if the code is
10 times slower, since the user is 10,000 times slower anyway.

The main thing is to optimise programming time and user
time, since run-time is now irrelevant.

DLLs, libraries, database engines and servers do the
raw performance work nowadays.

Michael Vondung

Wise Michael. Same goes for the emulators of computers
we once used and loved. Don't try them. repeat : don't try them.

Makes one wonder about past girlfriends... ;-)

Phil l'ancien-

Phil l'ancien

Ooops. Foolish me.
I'm the one who didn't use Liberty basic.
The figures I posted stand for Real Basic compiler.

Sorry 'bout that, guys !
(too many compilers installed ;-)

Phil l'ancien-

news@rtrussell.co.uk

Funny results, about Liberty. On my PC,
the original bench (10 times bigger),
runs in 2 secs.