25 Nov
2007
25 Nov
'07
10:09 p.m.
Although some people apparently disagree, dBase is not
an application
program; it's very similar to BASIC (and grew and matured just like
BASIC did) but with fairly extensive file-handling and
screen-handling capabilities.
How does that make it "not an application program"?
I suppose this really amounts to "just what do you understand an
`application program' to be?". Certainly my own understanding of the
term leaves room for something like dBase (or a Lisp engine, possibly
even with a text editor attached...or for a C compiler...or for that
matter for a BASIC engine). Lots of things have embedded programming
languages. Some of them are sophsticated enough to be useful in their
own right. Sometimes that's even the main purpose of the thing.
Whether such a language engine is an application program or not is, I
think, more a matter of what perspective you happen to be looking at it
from than of anything inherent to the thing itself.
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