> -----Original Message-----
> From: johnlim@... [mailto:johnlim@...]
> Sent: Domingo 25 de Junio de 2000 0:44

John, your idea of a basic upsizing wizard from Access to IB is one of those
ideas that went in circles around my head... but I needed disk space (my
machine is clogged) and I wiped out Access.
(This is part of no interest to the community but I'm running low on $$$ and
decided that purchasing a bargain IDE is not the way with my SCSI-3
subsystem... it's like including a turtle in a horse race, so I preferred to
uninstall the SW I don't use... and MS products are a good candidate for
useless SW that can be removed <grin>. In the future I will add another SCSI
disk I hope.)

> > IB itself is compiled with MS product in the Windows platform
>
> This is proof that Microsoft is too dominant for its own good! Even a
> borland product uses MS Visual C++!
>
> Regards, John Lim

Not so simple, sir. Actually ISC was an almost independent company inside
Borland, until the last time Yocam restructured Borland (before he was
kicked) in a move that submerged ISC inside the owner company, two years ago
approx.
Being ISC a subsidiary, people there took decisions and weren't tied to
Borland tools. A db engine is not a graphical environment, so GUI
capabilities are not the main point (ok, Access can be the exception here)
and also, MSVC was a very optimized compiler, probably produced faster
executables than Borland's BC++ and this fact incidentally lets you get
immediate compatibility when building UDFs with MSVC, for example.
Contrary to first thought, IB was not compiled with an "universal tool"
like GNU's gcc (that has been ported to several operating systems), but it
was built using a specific compiler on each platform. You can imagine the
conditional compilation tags that are in the source code.

C.