DG revs up BBASIC. (Data General Corp.'s Business BASIC 5.0) (product announcement)

DG REVS UP BBASIC

In late June, Data General released its first 32-bit implementation of AOS/VS Business BASIC. BBASIC Rev. 5 incorporates many of the items users have requested such as more user program/data space, more user channels, more user locks and improved performance over its predecessor Rev. 4.2. In addition, it provides new features such as debugging tools and TINPUT FILE, and maintains a high degree of compatibility with previous revisions.

In planning Rev. 5, that compatibility both in functionality and at the source-level was a primary concern. As a language which has evolved over the years, BBASIC has many obscure features upon which users depend. We believed that the entire language should be ported including all the STMBs, STMCs and STMEs. Only where the 32-bit architecture becomes visible should any recoding be necessary, as in the case of user-written Assembly language subroutines or the use of STMB 24 to make system calls.

Boosting Performance

Rev. 5's enhanced performance is the result of optimization, code cleanup, elimination of overplays and rewriting with 32-bit instructions. Single user computational performance, as measured by the GMTEST benchmark, shows an improvement of up to 68 percent with an average of 39 percent.

In addition, performance testing by the development team uncovered a bottleneck in the operating system with the …