Subj : Re: Is BASIC to be regarded as less than reputable prog lang?
To   : Malvinas
From : Bob Worm
Date : Wed Jul 10 2024 09:28:38

  Re: Re: Is BASIC to be regarded as less than reputable prog lang?
  By: Malvinas to Bob Worm on Tue Jul 09 2024 20:29:24

Hi, Malvinas.

 > Structures and pointers are not *the only REAL* programming...
 > Original GW-BASIC had PEEK and POKE which were a 'weird' form of pointers...

Yes, PEEK and POKE are a (clumsy) way to do pointers, I'm sure there's some way to find the address of a variable in most BASICs, then you have DIM for some kind of memory reservation. BBC BASIC has some nice pointer shortcuts in it, e.g. ?bla dereferences the byte at bla, or bla?10 dereferences the byte at bla+10. Then there's ! for words.

 > to make a "Battleship game (not sure that's the right name for that game in
 > english

Yes, exactly right :)

 > we couldn't find a better suited language for that
 > than BASIC, which comes fully equipped with a fairly robust set of tools and
 > instructions to control what goes on screen. This really speeds up creating
 > "text mode turn-based or action games", and this was the exact case.

That's a great example of when BASIC makes sense. I suppose nowadays they teach that using Python but BASIC would probably be safer and less frustrating.

Would I want to program a database or a BBS in BASIC, though? Probably not. As soon as you start pushing lots of data around you would probably want a different language.

 > There's a lot to learn about coding technique and style from *any* language,
 > actually, IMHO.

I agree, however a lot of BASICs don't allow for a lot of the techniques or are extremely limited in, e.g. how many layers of recursion you can do. Early BASICs didn't do functions / procedures so stuff got messy fast.

BobW
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