The miracle of Pick was Re: OT: Punctuation-starved ProgrammingLanguages (and/or love starved programmers, starving programmers, ...)

Cameron wrote... The best documentation on the Pick virtual machine - bar none - is "The Rainbow Book" as it is commonly referred to because of the front cover graphics (but that's not the name). The actual book is the "Reality by Microdata Assembly Language Reference Manual". It's the only book that really describes the guts. I believe I gave a copy to Al for bitsavers. In addition to that, I have probably about thirty plus (3 inch thick each) field engineer and internal only microdata binders. Awesome stuff :) Those will make it to bitsavers someday. With regards to the Pick Language, that's kinda hard. The beauty of Pick was the really tight melding between the virtual assembler, basic, and the database. You really can't appreciate one of them separately. It's only when you see how tightly integrated all 3 were that the beauty of the design becomes apparent. In most versions of basic, one must go through gyrations to do any serious database work (at least, what appears to be gyrations to pick-ites). In most basics, working with the filesystem feels like wearing mittens. With Pick BASIC, database I/O is almost relegated to the background of the programmers mind. That is also why Pick claims (and delivers) such rapid application development timeframes. Because programmers can write serious business applications so very quickly compared to most other systems - largely due to the way pick basic works with file I/O. Jay