Subj : Re: Is BASIC to be regarded as less than reputable prog lang?
To   : Malvinas
From : Spectre
Date : Mon Jul 08 2024 17:43:00

 Ni> Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - "Beginner's" being
 Ni> the key word.

 Ma> thought BASIC not to be "basic", or "beginner's language", despite
 Ma> the name or the fame it had (and seems it still has). If you try,
 Ma> you'll find amazing things done in BASIC and in other "languages"
 Ma> aswel, like "an .mp3 player in .bat batch file format"... crazy

 Its like a lot of things... sure you can do stuff with it, is it the best
tool in the shed probably not.

Depends on what you call basic too.  I think what most of us think of as
BASIC, especially back in 8 bit days, is going to be some version of MS-BASIC
with line numbers, that runs through an interpreter. These had the bonus of
being pretty small and made your computer somewhat useful pretty much out of
the box.  Its pretty slow if you need something approaching the speed of the
machine its running on though. There was also concern that people learnt bad
habits with this kind of language and it didn't cross over to other languages
very well.

Structured basic is a bit different, no line numbers, an abiliy to be
compiled rather than interpreted. To be honest I don't know a lot more about
it, I've never used it. This is put together more like other structured
languages, and probably leant itself to being a primer for other languages.

Spec


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