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My sympathy goes to those deep-South Americans who have had to suffer first
a natural disaster and then ineptitude of the rescue; not what one would
expect in the richest country in the world. Perhaps list-members are now
prepared to turn their attention back to our own, more trivial, concerns.

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Some recent postings on Nav-l have included listings of programs. This has
prompted me to ask for suggestions from list members about suitable
programs for doing simple calculations on a home computer. Not really a
navigation question at all, it's true... But I suspect that others have had
to face the same problems that face me.

Forty-odd years ago, I had some exposure to Fortran on a mainframe. Since
then, all my programming has been done using some dialect of Basic, on
programmable calculators or computers. I'm not really a "programmer", in
any real sense of the word, and writing programs is no more than a means to
an end. What I enjoy is solving technical problems, and a computer is a
necessary tool for that job.

My favourite version of Basic was the old QuickBasic as supplied with PC's,
years ago, when even home computers were actually expected to do some
computing. You could label the lines when needed, rather than having to
number them, and there were no restrictions on "go to" instructions, which
seem to be regarded now in many quarters as particularly naughty. What's
more, it had a superb manual.

On my Mac, I used TrueBasic, which I rather disliked for the converse
reasons; it imposed disciplines which irked me.

I've recently migrated from an old Mac to a laptop running Windows XP. My
new machine appears to offer no built-in programming (unless there's
something hidden away that I haven't discovered yet).  This computer can do
almost anything, except actually compute! So I need to find something, to
do mostly mathematics (all the trig functions), to double precision, some
statistics, and ideally with the ability to draw a bit of graphics as well.
It doesn't have to be free software (though that's my preference) and there
MUST be a decent printed manual available; I detest having to rely on
on-line "help". I'd rather pay real money for the manual than for the software.

Exploring around, I've picked up a copy of C++, which I haven't tried; just
reading the manual was enough to convince me that all the guff about
object-oriented programming was not for me. Was that the right decision?
I'm quite prepared to learn a new language, even at my advanced age, if
it's worthwhile doing so, but not if it's going to fade out and force me
into learning yet another new language later on. More relevant, the manual
I picked up, "C++ for Dummies", made no mention at all of any trig functions.

My preference would be to find a version of Basic. Visual Basic seems, at a
first glance, to be over-complex for my needs, and rather expensive. Is
there something simpler out there?

It's likely that others on Nav-l have been faced with the same problem, and
can give a bit of advice about their own favourite software.

George.
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Contact George at george@huxtable.u-net.com ,or by phone +44 1865 820222,
or from within UK 01865 820222.
Or by post- George Huxtable, 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13
5HX, UK.

   

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