How many of you use IWB for Work

[billhsln]

I was just wondering how many of our group use IWB to do actual production work.  I do.  The reason I was wondering, some one had recently said that Basic was a dying language.  I know I use IWB as a replacement for the old QBasic that came with DOS.  So, I was just wondering how many others of our group use it for actual production projects in their work.

Just FYI, I write in COBOL and RPG on an AS/400.  The death of COBOL has been heralded for more than 20 years.  It is still here and used in many installations.  COBOL is an old work horse with probably trillions of lines of code written in it.  I have one program with over 80,000 lines of code, not including external called subroutines.

Thanks,
Bill

[LarryMc]

I don't know if what I do here qualifies as "production" work but I sure do a hell of a lot of it.

[Brian]

Bill,
Most of the stuff I do are written with work in mind. I have a couple that are
used every day, and am just in the process of writing another. All for my own
pleasure, of course, but folk are pleased to use them for the time they save
We have our own IT manager and database programmer, but once I've shown
them a program I've written or tell them what I intend to do, they are quite
happy to let me go ahead
Brian

[Logman]

I use IWBasic for my work as a program manager on large government projects. Awhile back I wrote a logistics and storage program to account for all the US Army war reserves storage program in Europe using EBasic. I developed an enterprise logistics program to maintain inventory, shipments, read bar codes, forecast inventory reorder points, etc. using IWBasic.

A recent project involved modeling weather patterns and conducting research on improving weather forecasts based on local atmospheric conditions, frontal zones, and upper atmosphere jet stream data. By the way, this is the effort that convinced me of the need for a 64-bit version of IWBasic. I ran into memory allocation issues because 32-bit software is somewhat limited to 4GB while 64-bit software can exceed 64GB of internal system memory. Although 64-bit is not necessarily faster than 32-bit, its memory capability is substantially increased and you have access to 256-bit SSE instructions for performing real time, large scale vector calculations in the VAX instruction realm.

Right now I am authoring six publications to be used in entry-level courses at universities. My first publication and course material is "Inline Assembly Programming" using IWBasic and NASM. My second publication is on "64-Bit Assembly Language Programming - A Step-by-Step Introduction". My third publication is called, "Compiler Design Technology". In this book, I show how to develop a 64-bit compiler using IWBasic as the foundation to emit NASM 64-bit assembly code to be assembled by NASM. My fourth book is on how to "Develop an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)" for your compiler. Finally, I am putting together a book on the Adagè Programming Language, which is the 64-bit compiler developed in the Compiler Design Technology publication. Adagè is a simplified subset combination of BASIC and ADA.

I use IWBasic for the following reasons: (1) it is developed in the USA - government projects generally do not allow software developed outside the USA to be used, (2) IWBasic uses NASM/YASM instead of MASM/ARM as the core assembler - FASM and GoAsm are both very good products, but they are produced abroad, (3) inline assembly code blocks can be easily inserted in any IWBasic code, (4) IWBasic can include external libraries - static and dynamic, (5) IWBasic employs a linker to bring external modules together - which some other very good BASICs do not allow you to do, (6) IWBasic has a great interface to web programming that is understandable and easy to employ, and (7) the great forum and software support you get from Ionic Wind.

I have installed on my computer the following compilers: Ada 95/2000, IWBasic (and five other top-of-the-line BASICs including Visual BASIC 6.0, PowerBASIC, Hot BASIC, PureBASIC, Creative BASIC), C/C++, MASM32/MASM64, NASM, NASMX, GoAsm, FASM, JavaScript, and Microsoft BASIC/C# .net. (I apologize for naming some competing products. They are good in their own right and have their own ardent followers.)

Hands down I use IWBasic for all my critical work and as the basis for my publications. I find IWBasic more intuitive and easier to use than other BASICs. It does not have many of the shortcomings of other BASICs either. It compiles extremely fast and into very small, compact executables. And it is extremely fast--nearly as fast as or faster than some C languages I've used. Its underlying assembly code output is well optimized for the most part and really doesn't need to be extended with a lot of inline assembly code.

Because IWBasic allows inline assembly code to be used in a straight forward manner (i.e., passes most all inline assembly code untouched to the NASM assembler for compiling), it really streamlines the introduction to assembly language programming for students. I can have students up and running assembly language programs in no time because IWBasic automatically includes all the useful external libraries to many of the API functions that assembly students would otherwise have to write on their own. This in itself would be a huge undertaking. The length of the courses does not allow this to be done.

Anyway, just my two-cents.

Logman

[Bill-Bo]

Logman,

I am sure your two-cents are worth a lot more to
LarryMc. It is impressive what you do with IWBasic.

BTW. Do you have a Ph.D?

Happy IWBasing,

Bill

[GWS]

Wow, Logman .. what a tour de force .. 

Brilliant exposition.

Best wishes,

Graham