[HN Gopher] Birth of BASIC (2014) [video]
___________________________________________________________________
Birth of BASIC (2014) [video]
Author : nyc111
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-12-11 16:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| nliang86 wrote:
| https://www.videogist.co/videos/birth-of-basic-1720
| nyc111 wrote:
| They emphasize several times that "this was all before Bill
| Gates".
| pjmlp wrote:
| One interesting thing about original BASIC, is that it was JIT
| compiled.
|
| The REPL always compiled into native code before execution.
|
| Interpreters only came later with the adoption on 8 bit
| computers, which naturally didn't had the hardware resources for
| that.
| whartung wrote:
| Here are my curiosities about BASIC history.
|
| * When did the MS style tokenized, interpreted BASIC start?
|
| By this I mean, in MS BASIC, you have tokens that are evaluated.
| You enter text, the system tokenizes it, then when you run it,
| the interpreter does a combination of parsing and executing the
| tokens. It also reconstructs the program listing from the
| tokenized form. Curious what the origin of this style of BASIC
| was. Gate et al were clever, but I don't think they were that
| clever. I think this was borrowed from something else.
|
| * Why was the original BASIC-PLUS from DEC done the way it was?
|
| Unlike MS BASIC, B+ was compiled into an intermediate code (a
| stack machine as I understand it), and then executed. But this
| was done incrementally. As lines were entered, they were
| compiled, and put into place within the overall program. The
| original source was retained for editing, so you inevitably had
| two copies of the program: the source, and the compiled code,
| which isn't particularly efficient on the small machines of the
| day, but it ostensibly executed faster.
|
| You could "compile" B+, but that was more saving the runtime
| image to disk, without source code.
| wvenable wrote:
| All my research seems to indicate that tokenizing BASIC code on
| input was first done for Altair BASIC written by Gates and
| Allen. I'm not sure why you think they wouldn't be clever
| enough to come up with it. It's probably the only way one could
| get BASIC to work in the 4K of RAM available on the Altair.
| crq-yml wrote:
| At the time, while there was a lot of developing theory around
| string parsing and tokenization, a lot of the formal theory
| being crafted led to impractical implementations. At the same
| time, interactive coding was relatively new: a lot of systems
| were still using punchcards. I think this combination of
| constraints is why you would see things like the IBM 63-pass
| Fortran compiler[0]. But at the same time, Chuck Moore was
| working on Forth systems and had the sense to go in the
| direction of tokenization at input time, so I would point to
| him as one of the originators of the style.
|
| [0] https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/ibms-63-pass-fortran-
| compi...
| lucb1e wrote:
| BASIC should be uppercased in the title, then everyone will
| instantly get the subject of the video and that's also the title
| used by the submission
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now. Thanks!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Birth of BASIC (2014) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23830201 - July 2020 (36
| comments)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-12 23:01 UTC)