wow, george beckman, thanks for the great post.

i have been wondering if any of the p.c.-side programs could
match futurebasic in the small-size-of-the-final-program field.

the impression i had gathered was that none of them could,
so your information about delphi was very informative.

(especially that it delivers a single .exe without requiring .dll's,
which is important to me for reasons you'll see in a post here soon.)

and the knowledge that fb can be ported on the fly is really a wow!
i've done enough pascal to know i could pick it up if i was motivated.
(it's high-level enough.  looking at c++ code makes me wanna puke!)

long time ago, i wrote programs to convert my fortran code into basic, 
so i actually codified the search-and-replace strategy you speak of,
and it really does go fairly smoothly once you have enough knowledge.


>   Last, am I glad I ported?   
>   Alas, sorry to say, very glad.

...sounds like mixed emotions to me...                 ;+)
what's the product?

-bowerbird