Best choice for BASIC app building

[Anthony Fiorito]

I'm one of the systems guys at a site so I'm going to show my applications ignorance. We have a BASIC application. It needs to run on 30 or 40 systems running OpenVMS flavors from 7.1-2 to 7.3-2. We have to use at least BASIC v1.4 for the new variable types.

What should I use as my build platform to guarantee that the app will run correctly? Lowest rev of VMS? Highest? Does it matter?

Thanks in advance, Wizards.

[Ian Miller. · Accepted solution]

oldest version that BASIC V1.4 will run on. Upward compatability not backward compatability is what is provided.

Note that the BASIC runtime library may vary between VMS versions because it ships with VMS not the compiler.

[Robert Gezelter]

Anthony,

I concur with Ian, for the most part.

You need to check the BASIC documentation for comments about running on "Executing on older versions of OpenVMS" (or words to that effect).

In some cases, languages ship with an alternate set of objects which can be used to backport applications to slightly older environments. This needs to be checked. Ian's comment about checking whether BASIC 1.4 is compatible with older OpenVMS is right-on.

You need to build on the oldest version because the image activator checks the revision level of each shareable library used by an image, and issues an error message if the image linked against is newer than the version found.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com

[Ian Miller.]

From
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/basic/basic_index.html

HP BASIC v1.5B is supported on AlphaServer systems running OpenVMS v6.2 to v7.3.2. HP BASIC v1.6 is supported on Integrity servers running OpenVMS v8.2.

[Anton van Ruitenbeek]

Anthony,

If you are using different Basic versions, the best thinig is to use the lowest Basic on the building environment.
The best thing is to use on all the platforms the same Basic version.
If you're using newer versions on the production platforms you can consider to only link the .OBJ on these, so you don't have the sources on the production.
A bit of a problem is right now the Intel because this is completly difference. In this case you does need to use two versions.

AvR