Re: XyBasic (re Robert's skepticism)

[Russ Urquhart russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

On Nov 22, 2005, at 1:18 AM, Robert Holmgren wrote:
** Reply to message from Harry Binswanger  on Sun,
20 Nov 2005
23:59:19 -0500

You simply can't convince me that those 3 lines are more complex than
EXPAND.BAS, or that EXPAND.BAS with its 58 lines is somehow
"friendlier". Or
that you're "gaining" anything by writing this in a pseudo-
language. On the
contrary. When you get into real complexity, your language, too,
becomes very
dense, which strips away its primary appeal.
I've always enjoyed programming in Assembly language, as a hobby.
When i've written my few Xy programs, with copious help from Robert
and Carl, I've always gotten a similar low level, yet powerful sense
that you get when programming well in Assembly language.
In keeping with that, I am convinced that a "well thought out" coded
assembly language program, of which Xywrite is one, is always better
code that what can be gnerated by a compiler via a high level
language. (Now i know the economies of scale, and i would not want to
code a large program in assembly language, but i can help but feel we
are where we are today because we have larger hard drives and more
memory available then we know what to do with.)

Harry,
I think it is great that you are using BASIC as a model for cross
translation. (I do a similar thing to take my marked up Xywrite files
to the Framemaker MIFF format. It works for me.)

More power to you!

My two cents.

Russ