CompuServe Messages

CanDo does not provide such an option, so in that respect is much different from VB. Not having used or seen VB I cannot make any useful comparisons with CanDo, but I can say that CanDo's programming language is much more substantial than other Amiga basics other than, perhaps, AMOS. However, AMOS is quite different from other basics and does not use intuition in the "standard" way of such languages as C or Modula. CanDo provides 174 commands and 86 functions plus another 85 system variables which maintain needed information helpful in program development. It also provides an ARexx port and language support. Although not as flexible as a standard programming language, CanDo makes development of complex programs complete with GUI rather easier to develop than any other programming language on the Amiga, but that simplicity of development comes with the penalty of reduced flexibility. That's not a complaint, mind you, because I suspect that would generally be expected because you cannot anticipate everything the user might want and yet keep development simple and easy. The main defect of CanDo is that it is not a truly compiled language, so the entire language must be bound with every program deck if it is to distributed to users who don't have CanDo. Effectively, the language is interpreted and the "interpreter" is a run-time module. Recognizing that professional programmers may not find CanDo useful, I would say that for non-programmers it makes the power of the Amiga available to almost anyone. The language is very english-like and fairly easy to learn. However, it would be nice to have something like VB or its competitor, Realizer, available for the Amiga. I understand that the latter product is much more powerful than VB, from the reviews I've read.