Talk:Business Basic

This appears to be a disambiguation page masquerading as an article

It doesn't look like this article really discusses a single thing known as "business basic", but a bunch of products that used the word "business" in their name, thus being related in the same way that products with "Turbo" or "Lite" in their name are related, which is to say not very much.

Do the products referenced here actually share anything other than a similar name? Is there a common ancestry in code base, development team, company, and so on? Are the ISAM methods mentioned in the article implemented with the same APIs? Are the optimizations mentioned in the article similar in some notable way?

If the answers to these are mostly "no", I would recommend there be an article for each notable product, and that this article be reformatted as a disambiguation page.--NapoliRoma (talk) 21:25, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

There's some truth to what you say, but that isn't the whole truth. As the article says, there are two major families of BB. I only know one of these families: DGBB. As far as I know, MAI BB is completely separate, so to that extent this is indeed a disambiguation page. I'm not sure where Apple's BB fits in either. However, these two families were approaches to the same problem; of adapting the high-productivity Basic language to business needs; the syntax adapted differently, but the capabilities added were similar. In short, it isn't just a similarity in naming.

Within DGBB, there were several programs with independent code bases produced by separate vendors, all competing in overlapping markets loosely defined by customers who had originally programmed for the DG Nova in DGBB. Bluebird was probably the least compatible of these and may have started in a different marketplace. B32 introduced a Bluebird-compatible mode, and in general the different vendors both introduced innovations and tried to stay compatible with their opposition's innovations. I'm not so familiar with the situation since 1990, but Transoft's Universal Business Language, I believe, expanded compatibility still further, to include some compatibility or conversion tools from more diverse environments still. I'm not sure if this included compatibility with MAI BB.-gadfium 23:28, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I think a good start to rehabilitating this article would be to replace its current content with what you just wrote. :-) Cheers,NapoliRoma (talk) 00:09, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

If you look at the Business Basic FAQ (I've just fixed the link), Answer 4 says DGBB was "originally very similar to the MAI language". The FAQ pretty clearly establishes that these are implementations of a language called "Business Basic".

I'm glad my ramblings have helped make things more clear for you.-gadfium 03:28, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

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