Slashdot Mirror
BASIC Computer Language Turns 40
5 REM nam37 codes
10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END
10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END
GOTO 10
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
1963+40=2003
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Obviously they failed, and so they created BASIC instead.
10 PRINT "First Post" 20 END
... BASIC's much acclaimed successor, Visual Basic ;-)
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
10 I miss basic on TI-80 calcs.
20 Programming in basic was my favorite thing to do in math class
30 my freshman year.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
yet simple enough that even the school's janitors could use it
And that, children, is where the seeds of garbage collection were sowed.
-Adam
And that professor must be spinning in his grave (if he's dead?) knowing the likes of VB and VB.NET has plagued the computer science field since MS got their claws on it....
Meant to be a joke... VB is a good tool for prototyping and simple stuff where it excels.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
10 PRINT "I hearby declare..."
20 PRINT "that all comments in this story"
30 PRINT "be typed in basic"
40 END
10 Good old grade 5 computer class. Thanks for the memories. GOTO 10.
Really. Well done!
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
Ooo. Me Grandpa was a custodian and a very smart man. Watch your mouth. I work for a school and the janitors here are smart folks too. Most of all, they treat the lowly tech guy with respect in spite of his job and the fact that he lives in his parents basement and has never touched a girl (not a real girl anyway).
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra
So, I'm just curious. I've heard it claimed that BASIC was "invented" by Microsoft, or that they own it, or that their first product was a BASIC interpreter or something. Where did this story come from? What's the connection between MS and BASIC?
I think this story wins the "formatting most likely to make people think Slashdot has been hacked" award.
Damn I hated numbering each line of code!
And when you had to add something and have uneven spacing of line numbers... Oh it just drives the type A personality in me nuts!
The only good part about line numbers was how easy it made it to write GOTO statements.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Thanks for the creativity.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
10 CLS
20 PRINT "I fail it!"
30 END
Then VB came, and a language was created that was muscular enough to script Word macro viruses, but simple enough to enfuriate good programmers (I mean, really, no short circuit boolean operators? It makes me weep.)
"Learning BASIC causes permanent brain damage." -- E.Dijkstra
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
10 PRINT "You fail" 20 PRINT "it" 30 END
That's an odd thing to say. In terms of syntax it's hard to call Java "rooted" in a non-algol language like BASIC. I guess it does share with BASIC the fact that both are marketed towards non-programmers (well, people who don't program for a living, at least).
All's true that is mistrusted
10 PRINT "YOU FAIL IT!"
20 GOTO 10
(note to mods: this is funny; please moderate accordingly)
Don't rag on the janitors you elitist pricks.
If it was born in 1963, wouldn't it have turned 40 last year? Seems a little sloooowww, kinda like my Timex sinclair which irritated me because you could only use the basic command preprogrammed into the keyboard.
But I must admit I really loved BASIC in the day. But Perl runs my life now (or I wish it did!).
The previous sig has been removed due to
Ok, who remembers the Star Trek game from Dartmouth? You know, the one where you got to enter coordinates to move the ship to, then fire photons and phasers at Klingons? You could even consult the library computer! Failing that, who remembers coding the "trench" game?
| * |
| * |
| * |
| * |
|* |
| |
| |
*BOOM* YOU CRASHED. TRY AGAIN? [Y/N]
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
SYNTAX ERROR IN 10
What it really means is that the programmers won't program exactly the way Dij wants them to do. It is not "good" or "bad": just different. Programming should not be a straitjacket: the more options and the more different ways to do thing, the better. Those who think that there is no place for anything like a GOTO should look at html.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I would create a witty BASIC code responce, but my mind has shunned all knowledge of BASIC from my head.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. (Edsger Dijkstra)
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Hey, that is the language I learned first, on a TRS-80.
I had alot of fun w/ this program:
10 NEW
and this one:
10 TRON
15 REM machine speed is 330 loops per second
20 FOR I = 1 TO 330
30 FOR J = 1 TO 10
40 NEXT J, I
50 LIST
I has so much fun learning basic as a teen and doing some crazy stuff with QBASIC.. sure it's lame... but after making a simple polygon 3D engine i realized it's time for me to move on. Happy B-Day!
Cool! How did you get that green link thing in your listing?
;)
I'm looking at the commands printed on my ZX81's keyboard, but I can't find any color commands! Do I need an Apple ][ for that?
For OS X users looking for some of that Old School goodnees, you can grab Chipmunk Basic at Versiontracker.com
And we're supposed to trust advice on programming languages from someone with an Unlambda program in their sig???? ;)
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
Not that hard.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
and BASIC was born.
It always struck me that BASIC was easier to understand if you were high.
10 Print "How old were you when you wrote your first basic program?" 20 Print "A) 0-5 years old" 30 Print "B) 5-7 years old" 40 Print "C) 8-10 years old" 50 Print "D) 11-13 years old" 60 Print "E) 14-16 years old" 70 Print "F) >16 years old" 80 Print "G) Basic, What's Basic?" 90 Input x ....
I for one would fit into catagory A, on a commodore 64.. Knew how to format a floppy at age 5, much to my brother chargrin when I wiped out their saved games and papers.... Got in BIG trouble for that one...
That was "Applesoft", from, you guessed it, Microsoft. Before the PC, I think Microsoft built itself on that product. Please see this page.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Now we have languages that are hard enough for gurus to read half the time, and others that are so wonderful and elegant that I believe janitors of today could learn and use quite easily.
:>
I remember using my first computer at age 5 and playing around with BASIC, and I could do a reasonable amount with it. Lets be glad though that most of us have moved on
10 for x = 1 to 2
20 x = x -1
30 print "ALL YOUR BASIC ARE BELONG TO US"
40 next x
My first language way back in the day...
I wrote a simple geology DB to identify minerals, a 2-handed spade game that could beat most people, and kept improving StarTrek games. All on a slow time-shared HP2000F with a TTY terminal and paper tape storage.
I learned from a slim paperback called "My Computer Likes Me (when I speak in Basic)". It had the best explanation of how and why each statement worked. I am still looking for a copy of this for my collection of computer books.
I moved on to more complete languages that allowed me to create bigger programs, but in many ways, the first language was the most fun.
I wrote my very first program in Basic on an 8K PDP-8/I computer ("Hello World!") back in 1975. We had to toggle in the bootstrap instructions using the toggle switches, load the OS from a paper tape and then finally the Basic application off the DECtape drive. I was just amazed at the possibilities and would come in on my own time just to write silly little programs.
Phoenix
10
.
.
70 INPUT "Do you want to talk to the White Fuzzy Animal?";Q$
80 IF (Q$ = "Y") OR (Q$ = "y") THEN GOTO 90
85 Print "Your squire takes out the Holy Hand Grenade!"
90 Print "A Rabbit with big pointy teeth bites your head off"
I find BASIC an excellent language. It got me into all this programming. I started learning it when i was about 7, then later moved up on HTML. After that came ASP, then my dad got me into PHP, i did some Java, now i'm stuck with C. Although, i still feel the urge to open up a Windows command line, and type QBASIC. That... that was the good ole' times :)
Of course, the odds are the computers used back in 1963 had UPPER CASE letters only. Real programmers don't need lower case!
I tried to enter this message in just upper case, but it pissed off the lameness filter. Lame.
Funny... I don't remember having hyperlinks in my BASIC programs.
What did it run? Forth, of course!
(Sorry, just had to show there was a better alternative to BASIC back in the early '80s. I still do Forth regularly in OpenFirmware)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
This is basic, remember?
10 PRINT "ALL YOUR BASIC ARE BELONG TO US"
20 GOTO 10
GOTO, the staple of a master basic programmer.
--- I do not moderate.
Why on earth is the parent getting moderated down?? He makes an excellent point. BASIC was neither the first human-readable language nor in any way linguistically related to Java. In short, he's right.
(to the mod)
;-)
I knew someone here would have the same sense of humor
10 POST TROLL 20 IF MSG = GOATSE THEN CLOSE WINDOW 25 SET X = MODPOINTS 30 FOR N = 1 TO X 35 TROLLMOD = TROLLMOD -1 40 NEXT N
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
BASIC
1964-2005
Requiscat in Pace
10 PRINT "SUE !"
20 GOTO 20
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
Oh yeah and "Goto considered harmful" too, of course.
RIP buddy. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
This brings me back... the first language I ever learned to code in was C++... but before that, I had learned Qbasic. ;)
...but I think, the biggest fad was making console style RPGs. I'd like to think that I had a small hand in starting that fad, with a little Qbasic RPG demo I released in 1997. Some of you may have played it, it was called "Lianne in... the Dark Crown". Yes, fun times... fun times indeed.
I think it was the limited nature of the language which kept me interested in it for so long. Those DOS memory limits were fun... coding a 2D RPG, and trying to stay within around 450KB, so it would run on most people's DOS machines. It was a challenge, I tell you... and trying to keep the code neat, and tidy... also a fun challenge.
To this day, I'm still amazed at some of the things which people were able to do with QBasic, and QuickBasic... fast raycasters, 3d polygon game engines, even voxel engines!
I think, I'll go looking for all those old Qbasic games. They may not have been much, but they were fun to play.
I didn't say only non-programmers used Java, I said Java was marketed towards, AMONG OTHER PEOPLE, nonprofessional programmers. It's presented as an easy language to pick up on, and, in fact, lots of non professional programmers have used it to do things like rotate images and play sounds on their webpages, for instance.
Jeez, you Java people are sensitive.
All's true that is mistrusted
Back in the days when programming was fun.
Amy
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Thanks for that refreshing originally-styled newsbyte.
And it'll probably be another 10 years before we see it again when BASIC turns 50?
I hope not.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
www.clausejner.dk
Atari Basic
6502 Assembler
Fortran
Action!
Deep Blue C
Pascal
Metrowerks C
GNU C
Perl (just enough to make my Unix life easier)
Java
GNU C++
Visual Basic
RealBasic
Have I come full circle? By the time I got to C++ and VB, I was mainly programming for work, but RB has made programming fun again, and I have launched a couple personal projects for the first time in years.
Gold bonus points if you know what Action! was.
--- Ban humanity.
Ripped straight from the linked article... but then again, nobody here reads those.
10 GOTO 20
20 PRINT "Ha"
paintball
What I was saying was not that MS had claimed this, but that persons on slashdot previously had claimed this. I was trying to see to what extent this was an urban legend and where this urban legend came from. Thank you for responding :)
Well I'm glad BASIC exists because I probably would not have started programming without it. Can you imagine trying to learn C or something like that when you are 13 (circa 1984) and have no other programmer friends and no internet or BBS to get sample code from. Also C and Pascal compilers cost big money back then. Borland's Turbo Pascal was probably the other big hobby language back the as well. It probably damaged my skills, but I think I have overcome most of the damage.
And Windows 3.1 never would have been as accepted as it was if not for VB 1.0. I think VB was probably the thing that got a lot of people on Windows because programming Windows in C at that point was very complicated for the home hobbiest.
What part of HTML resembles GOTO's?
10 ? "CmdrTaco and Kathleen stting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G";
15 ? CHR$(7)
20 goto 10
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I was probably seven or eight when I started playing around with BASIC on the Commodore 64.
:)
It was another ten years before I discovered that other programming languages existed.
BASIC is evil. 'nuff said.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Hey, stop using janitors as some lowest-common-denominator! Rather "The language was so simple even programmers could use it."
The JLO
Now with all of this outsourcing programmers are going to have to be ready to take jobs as janitors!
Ah yes, BASIC. I remember it distinctly as it's what I used for the longest time. Didn't have to declare your variables, had to contend with line numbers (that renum thing came in very handy), and of course the ever-popular GOTO statements.
;-)
Eventually I evolved onto qbasic with its functions and subs and (gasp) no line numbers! Then there's VB and VBA. The most fun I've had with those are the shell calls.
On machines that are so locked down that you can't even traverse directories let alone get a shell prompt, you run your form of BASIC, and do basic shells through it or even shell to cmd.exe or command.com -- at one point, I had a really lamed out, simple, featureless, just for fun version of netcat that executed shell commands, piped it to a text file, and had the text file's contents sent through the network. (this with VB's socket stuff). If nothing else, it was a good way to make fake Novell login prompts in the mid 90's.
In the end, not a lot of people will be taken seriously for knowing BASIC, but since it was the first language I used, I appreciated the retro code.
Who here dreamed of writing your own version of space invaders in basic as a kid. My personal pipe dream involved a TRS-80. Long live Radio Shack, Long live Tandy!
10 PRINT "Happy Birthday to you"
11 PRINT "Happy Birthday to you"
12 PRINT "Happy Birthday dear BASIC"
13 END
Dammit... Missed out a line. Now I remember why I should always increment line numbers by 10.
Had a lot of fun doing that on TRS-80s in jr. high.
Damn. I miss Gorilla. Throwing bananas at each other over the city
Doesn't know REAL basic.
[biteme@bender biteme]$ x=1; while x=1; do echo "First Post"; done
First Post
First Post
First Post
First Post
First Post
.
.
.
.
.
laugh it up, taco
60 GOTO 10
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Today's VB and similar derivatives bears so little resemblance to Dartmouth BASIC that it's hardly the same language. If it wasn't for FOR/NEXT and DIM, you might not recognize it at all.
But the old line-oriented BASIC had some advantages in the bad, old days:
1) Interactive editing is difficult to do on a teletype -- many schools only had a hardcopy terminal to a timeshare service. Being able to drop a line in the middle, or retype a single statement really really helped learn what was going on, without having to re-send the entire program. Even with a primitive CRT, full-screen text editors were of poor quality -- dropping in statements helped to debug and fix features.
2) Later, it was ubiquitous: You could write the same abusive repeating naughty-word program at a Radio Shack, an Apple Dealer, or a department store selling Commodore PETs.
3) It beat COBOL or FORTRAN. The only thing with BASICs interactivity might be FORTH -- imagine if we'd been saddled with page-delimited, stack-based code in all our micros. It's a lot harder to learn, but would have helped modularity and library development.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I learned BASIC in 7th grade on the boxes in my public school's apple IIe room. I remember spending all of my free time during the (public school-quality) computer class trying to figure out how to write one of those 'virus' things I heard about on a BBS and since I didn't have a 'real' computer I ended up writing a really long program called "boom" on my IIe, which essentially was a sort of BASIC virus that would wipe the floppy disk (what with no hard drive and all) and save itself onto the disk under a random filename chosen from a line from my favorite band at the time. All the assignments for the class were about 30 lines long, but 'boom' was easiy 500, and everyone in the class watched me code it and were more interested in anything not related to programming "merry christmas" programs, so they happily let me run the file on all their computers. About a week after we got out for summer, the teacher called me up very angrily and wanted to know if I knew anything about why every students disk had the same program on it, with filenames like "esusbuil" and "uiltmyho", and yet nothing else. What could I say, but "Boom!" BASIC was awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBASIC
By the way, the "Beginners All Pupose Symbolic Instruction Code" acronym came way after it was called BASIC
=P
"I wasn't using my civil rights anyway...."
I see the debate between the Basic vrs. Anti-Basic camps is also 40 years old and as strong as ever.
Hmm! I'm soon to be 45, this article depresses me! Well at least Fortran is still older than me. It was created in 1954.
I must admit that I share his lament. The programmer-to-user ratio got considerably worse as the ubiquity of computers increased.
When I got my first computer (comment hoping skip the 'geek pissing match'), the majority of other people with computers were using them to write programs. As the PCs (now workstations) got adopted (then coopted) by 'business' for them to do their thing, the computer became a 'tool'. I never stopped programming, but all my non-geek friends started to get in on the computer-owning game. Most of them couldn't write a line of BASIC with a gun to their head, even though they have the capacity to do so, but gosh, they all thought they were just whizz-bang computer users! *sigh*
As a colleague of mine (and a really amazing programmer) once said: "Accessibility is the yellow brick road to mediocrity"
Heh. I remember playing Adventure on my dad's lab's Pet2001 (and later the fancy 4016. Woo!!). With a (very little) bit of understanding of strings vs. numbers, I coded a few thousand lines of a game like that. Then I started typing games in from magazines, and realised that they did things VERY differently. That was the end of my adventure-writing career.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"Programming should not be a straitjacket: the more options and the more different ways to do thing, the better."
Spoken like someone who's never had to maintain a lick of code in his life.
"Those who think that there is no place for anything like a GOTO should look at html."
I take that back. Someone who's never coded in his life.
lay off the janitors!
No, I meant Java. There are lots of people who are not professional programmers who use Java, particularly to write applets for web pages. I brought up two common things those applets do, play sounds and rotate images.
First year comp sci classes often use Java as their language. There's no sharp distinction (to the beginning programmer) between the language and the libraries and APIs. Sun marketed the free SDK towards individual home users. I was pointing out that in those senses (alleged ease of learning and free and widely available development kit), it's like BASIC. Syntactically, it's not at all like BASIC; it's a grandchild of Algol through-and-through.
All's true that is mistrusted
Numbering made life much easier. And if it got untidy you could just get it to renumber. The first line became 50 (or was it 100?) and everything else after that came in increments of 10.
It made debugging much easier though....
ERROR XX ON LINE YY
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Only the most primitive BASICs don't (or didn't) have the tools for "structured programming".
"Your seeming moral ambiguity about the styles one can use spring from a personal coping mechanism attemptimg to rationalize your bad habits as valid"
If it gets the job done well, "Bad habit" is just a subjective judgement call.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
then there was
(legend of the red dragon)
when you screwed up then, you just tracked down the problem and undid what you screwed up.
Now you reformat & reinstall windoze
on the good side, I don't see as much spaghetti as in those days... carbs and all that
well runnin on has to stop it's almost happy hour time.
where'd my training wheels go?
--robin
...Boycott Disney
Well, too bad perl was invented rougly 20 years later. Even i can use it, and i have dificulties managing HTML.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
Thank the lord for those old BBC micro's. Surely we all remember using them in all those science experiments. Then there was the great:
:)
10 *FX 200,1
20 COLOUR RND(255)
30 PRINT "HA HA HA!";
40 GOTO 10
Gem to keep anyone from doing anything constructive for a while
The language of Mordor! We do not speak it here!
One of the old home computer mags -- not Creative Computing, but something in that genre -- had a listing of a simple four-room text adventure game. It was mostly an exercise in picking up and dropping things, but the parser and display/action loop were easily adaptable.
I adapted and expanded it to create "Haunted House," AKA "Radley Mansion." The player took the role of a kid who had hit a baseball into a second-story window of an abandoned (?) house.
The goal was to get the ball back. You had to do quite a bit to reach the upstairs room where the ball ended up.
You couldn't get killed, or even muck things up so bad you couldn't eventually win.
I eventually re-wrote it in TurboBasic, and have started on an Inform version.
Stefan
It never ceases to amaze me what kids will latch on to. In this case Haiku. In English haiku is completely pointless if not ridiculous. It has no real symmetry, elegance or beauty as it does in Japanese. And yet, college kids seem to think that "it is the coolest, man". It must be due to the fact that they all suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder and short prose of Haiku is all they can handle in one sitting.
Here's a clue kiddies, Haiku in English is dumb.
Now I expect lots of posts supporting English Haiku and telling me that I am an idiot. But none will offer anything but the verbatim dronings of their professors, which they seem to feel are gods. Forgive my condescending chuckle.
Needs a REM line. Sloppy programming.
I oft referenced that ASCII table well into the late 90s :)
I learned the majority of basic programming just by following the hyperlinks in the help file. Almost every function came with a useful example program.
The whole help system in q/quickbasic was very well done. You could point and click on a function and bring up its help entry IIRC.
-
Redmond, U.S.A. -- One year later
...and while he drinks his sixth whiskey, he
...
suddenly has an idea and begins to type...
10 REM Windows NT Version 0.1
20 ON ERROR GOTO **STOP
30
Syntax Error "PROFIT!"
-------------------^
Command Not Found "PROFIT"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...of typing in BASIC programs on a Teletype with a large roll (yes, just like bathroom towels) of yellow newsprint on a Data General Nova.
And, to write and read my program - paper tape!
In those days, having a machine do math for you, math that would otherwise be tedious crunching by hand, gave me a sense of wonder and power.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
5 REM foo 10 PRINT "hello world" 20 END
Belive it or not back in the dos 2.x with basica / gwbasic i was writing a chess program and hit the maximum line number. its 32k lines from line number 1 with each line incremented by 1. It simply told me "Out of memory"
Vax Basic was great!, an excellent learning tool and pretty decent productivity as long as you avoided goto statements, if you stuck with For loops and gosubs it really isn't that much different than "C" coding... Well, okay Vax-Basic was great at the time. I guess I am more fond of VAX/VMS, a truly great OS. They had advanced I/O queueing (just now in the 2.6 Linux kernel), and per process I/O, memory, and CPU throttles. Shame that it was stripped down and used as the foundation for...GASP...Windows NT!!! Hmmm....I guess this dates me a little?
Don't believe it, kids. If your brain hasn't been ruined by age 7, you can unlearn any bad habits you pick up. His remark is of a stupidity level equal to "if you learn French at school, you won't be able to learn German."
As a matter of fact, not only did I once inherit a program that someone had written - well - on a BBC micro that was a pleasure to maintain, I once myself had to write a quick and dirty assembler for an obscure microprocessor in HP Basic, having no other resources available in a crisis. Despite which I have never once had the urge to use labels in C.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I miss line numbers and GOTO
True friends are hard to come by... I need more money. - Calvin
10MODE2
20PRINT"My first experience with BASIC was on a"
30PRINT"BBC B many many moons ago"
40PRINT`"BBC BASIC was and is the best BASIC"
50GOTO1000
1000PRINT"So there"
1010END
First, there certainly _is_ "good" and "bad" code. An experienced programmer has certain tastes, sure, but some code is just downright bad, making it near impossible to maintain or worse, riddled with security flaws.
I've seen plenty of folks start out with BASIC (I'm talking the classic stuff here, Applesoft or GW or some such) and go on to become very good C, C++ and Java programmers.
_Visual_ BASIC, however, I would tend to say is a bad language to start out with. Folks who cut their teeth on VB (again this is just in my experience) do tend to have poor programming style. It's easy to spot VB-raised folks on a PHP forum, for example, and just shake your head at the backwards way they're trying to get things done.
So I don't know if I agree Dijkstra about BASIC itself, but I know that when people "learn" programming in an inconsistant language or where there are assumed to be lots of libraries which become almost more of a focus than the language constructs themselves, they have a very hard time learning a different language and/or better design and style. I doubt it's "beyond hope of regeneration" though.
Or the programmer did think about it, and the use of the GOTO (or equivalent "jump over here!" coding tool) caused no problems in regards to these issues.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
5 REM AYBABTU NEVERENDING ...."
10 PRINT "In A.D. 2101"
20 PRINT "War was beginning."
30 PRINT "Captain: What happen ?"
40 PRINT "Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb."
50 PRINT "Operator: We get signal."
60 PRINT "Captain: What !"
70 PRINT "Operator: Main screen turn on."
80 PRINT "Captain: It's You !!"
90 PRINT "Cats: How are you gentlemen !!"
100 PRINT "Cats: All your base are belong to us."
110 PRINT "Cats: You are on the way to destruction."
120 PRINT "Captain: What you say !!"
130 PRINT "Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time."
140 PRINT "Cats: HA HA HA HA
150 PRINT "Captain: Take off every 'zig' !!"
160 PRINT "Captain: You know what you doing."
170 PRINT "Captain: Move 'zig'."
180 PRINT "Captain: For great justice."
190 GOTO 5
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
And lo, thousands of people suddenly decided to call themselves excellent programmers!
I was expecting to see someone quote Al Gore as saying that HE created BASIC.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The only fight I ever had was after I wrote
10 PRINT "Carl is an idiot"
20 GOTO 10
Never was a Commodore Pet more incendiary.
Needless to say, our 7th grade "fight" was as meaningless as the program.
I loved BASIC. I can call myself a programmer because of it.
Success without humility is an indulgence in arrogance
Or is that "j-ello"
As in "jello world".
emt 377 emt 4
This book?
I might have another link if that one doesn't work for you.
It's not your father's BASIC. It's a great RAD environment, with a language much more heavily influenced by Python than BASIC. You can write plugins in C/C++ to make the things that need to run super fast run super fast.
My company uses this product to build products that generate several hundred thousand in revenue per year. Our tools budget is under thousand dollars per year, mostly spent on REALbasic.
you got software, I remember going to the library and renting 101 fun games for BASICA (I think that was the name of it) - you sat and typed 100's of lines of code just to plat tic-tac-toe
45 IF $ARTICLE="BASIC" GOSUB 60 //e IN APPLE BASIC! I COULD MAKE BAD GRAPHICS AND ASCII ART ALL DAY WITH MY 80 COLUMN EXPANSION CARD!"
60 PRINT "COOL! I USED TO PROGRAM ON MY APPLE
70 GOTO 50
CVS
free ipod and free gmail!
...yet most of its story got lost in write-errors on unreliable cassette tape recorders attached to thousands of ZX SPECTRUMs.
Forgive me, it must be that brain damage everybody's talking about around here.
And yes, my code sucks. Even in BASIC. And that was 15 years ago.
Don't forget to PEEK before you POKE!
Computers died for me the day the stopped shipping them with built-in BASIC.
Seriously, though. The computers of the 80's were great for learning programming on. Not that BASIC is a good teaching language, but it was accessible and simple.
Modern computers have too many features that you want serious programmers to have access to (complicating languages), and modern languages have all sorts of safety, structure, and OO features that are great for serious programmers but also complicate things for beginners.
Breaking into programming is much harder than it used to be.
I didn't know you could insert hyperlinks into BASIC programs... Guess I missed that last update. =P
At first I ended up with a c in the highschool course and that really pissed me off! Why?
.... but, writing elegantly designed algorithms and code is a different matter. :-)
For doing things like including the goto statement. I knew programing but not structored programing and thought I knew more then the teacher as a typical 17 year old.
Anyway, I aced the final by learning "the proper" structured way in Basic.
Its easy. There is a routine called sub/go sub.
Sub is aka method in Java and Function in C/C++. The difference is you can not pass arguments(at least not that I was aware of, this was highschool). Being a highschool course we all used global variables so passing arguments were not needed. Shudder
Anyway, by doing subroutines and using go sub, you can chnage line after line without causing bugs and still have it structured properly, just like calling functions in C. Each goto was marked 10% off on my final.
I guess it was good that line numbers were eliminated in Visual Basic and later languages. I hated it at first being a dumb kid writing simple programs but see its value now. Would I have stopped using goto?
If you force kids to learn programing by gettng rid of the goto and line numbers and instead subs and go subs, they will learn to write structured programs real quick.
Infact its hard not to wrote unstructured programs in C/C++ later on.
http://saveie6.com/
10 FOR I = 1 TO 3 STEP 1
20 PRINT I;
30 IF I = 1 THEN GOTO 100
40 IF I = 2 THEN GOTO 120
50 IF I = 3 THEN GOTO 140
60 IF I = 4 THEN GOTO 70
70 PRINT "Profit!!!"
80 NEXT
90 End
100 PRINT ": In Soviet Russia the language uses the janitors"
110 GOTO 200
120 PRINT ": All your mainframe timeshares are belong to us"
130 GOTO 200
140 PRINT "???"; INPUT A
150 IF A = "" THEN GOTO 200
160 IF A "" THEN GOTO 170
170 PRINT "RTFA"
200 I = I + 1
210 GOTO 20
#!/usr/bin/perl
# REM nam37 codes
X10: print "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical ";
X20: print "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness ";
X30: print "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even ";
X40: print "the school's janitors could use it.\n";
X50: end
# (don't ask me why I did this...)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
nuff said, props to the Janitorial staff out there. peace out...
QUOTE
UBASIC is a BASIC-like environment which is suitable for number theoretic investigations. Version 8 of UBASIC has the high precision real and complex arithmetic (up to 2600 digits) of previous versions, but adds exact rational arithmetic and arithmetic of polynomials with complex, rational, or modulo p coefficients, as well as string handling and limited list handling capabilities. In addition UBASIC has context-sensitive on-line documentation (read ubhelp.doc for information). The file ubhelp.xxx that this uses is ASCII and can be printed for hard copy documentation.
UNQUOTE
UBASIC is still useful.
The version of BASIC I learned as a youg'un (TRS-80 Extended Color BASIC) had only FOR as loop constructs. Since there were no while or until loops, I remember simulating them with FOR:
The until:
The while:
Sick, ain't it?
For the pedants: LET was optional in Trash 80 Color BASIC, but I'm sure I'm misremembering something else here.
I was introduced to BASIC first on a friend's Apple IIe and subsequently on my own first computer, an original Macintosh.
First programs included the standard:
10 print "Enter your name: "
20 input NAME$
30 print NAME$ " is a doofus."
40 goto 30
About that time, I started getting 3-2-1 Contact Magazine, a science and nature periodical written for kids who had grown out of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. In the back of every issue was the "BASIC Training" feature, which had simple games and programs for a variety of platforms. The IBM versions were usually the only ones I could use; Apple IIe and Commodore 64 PEEK and POKE calls were meaningless in Mac MS-BASIC.
But later, BASIC facilitated an (extremely sketchy) introduction to the Macintosh toolbox. MS-BASIC on the mac had built-in pseudo toolbox calls so that you could change fonts, draw graphics primitives and buttons. I ended up writing a grade tracking program that was a snare of interwoven GOTOs and GOSUBs.
I breezed through two years of programming courses in high school and learned C in my own time. Looking back, I'm a little ticked off that my HS didn't offer "real" computer science with Pascal or C or any sort of AP treatment.
Then I learned Perl. Now I do websites. I've forgotten most of BASIC. I have been told this is a good thing. But sometimes (actually, lately, more and more) I have to deal with VBScript and I see "LEFT" and "MID" and I think "what the hell is this crap?"
Ah, memories.
I wasted many, many hours in eighth grade writing a semi-Zork-clone in Applesoft Basic using DOS 3.3. The user got to walk around town skewering various people with his glowing sword. Doubt that this would be much appreciated in a post-Columbine junior high school.
sulli
RTFJ.
A real programmer can extract useful work from anything from a pile of matchboxes to a state of the art cluster without bitching.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
in 100 years, will students learn programming like they do mathematics? Start off with Basic (addition), then move to pascal (subtraction), Object Models (multiplication) and Databases (division) and then on to the by then "real" programming languages.
Or will out beloved BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, et al just be studies by the historians of computer science like somone might study Latin or a primative dialect?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
The earlier a kid starts programming, the better. It's not hard to learn new languages, styles and paradigms later. Basic makes it easy to get started.
People that make statements about GOTOs have never coded assembly in their life.
I see that saying anything about Java except "It is perfect for N-tier enterprise applications" gets you flamed on Slashdot. So be it.
I reiterate my statement:
IN ADDITION TO the many and varied business applications for Java, it was designed and marketed as a SIMPLE programming languages that would teach GOOD HABITS to BEGINNING programmers. This does not mean it's a toy language, or that it's not powerful. It simply means that one of the virtues of Java Sun pushed was that beginners could pick it up and learn it fairly easily.
No, it's quite challenging for a beginning programmer, but it's do-able and there are plenty of websites that show you how.
All's true that is mistrusted
I remember firing up BASIC (or was it BASICA...or GWBASIC?) and starting by setting "Screen 2", which let you use the graphics components. Next was "Auto" for auto line numbering. "System" was to exit BASIC.
BTW if you want to go back in time and work on GW-Basic, its available as a abandonware at this site xtcabandonware.com and GWBASIC is available here GWBASIC.
Cheers
--
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
Basic wasn't meant to be the end-all be-all computer language. It was a toy language with a very specific purpose in mind, and if everyone remembered it as that, things would be fine. The creators of Basic wrote a book a few years back writing about the design of Basic, and why they made it the way it is. It was meant to be used with a teletype to allow programming while on a computer, allowing quicker debugging and testing than ever before. In order to allow it to be compiled quickly, it had extremely simple syntax. If we just left things at that, there never would have been any controversy.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
Nothing stopping you from using structure in BASIC but your own mind.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
10 LET AGE=1 20 AGE = AGE+1 30 PRINT AGE 40 GOTO 20
Just think, if it weren't for BASIC and BillG / PaulA's early implemetation of it, Microsoft might not be where it is today. Oh well, I'm not going to hold that against it... I'll be sure to have a drink in BASIC's honor tonight.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Comp Sci was what coverted me from someone who could write stuff in BASIC/Java/C/C++/assembly/Pascal to someone who could write software well. The prior experience gained from teaching myself programming (starting at age 8 :-) was invaluable; but so was that gained through taking all those CompSci papers.
:-)
No, I'm not being paid to write the above
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I started programming BASIC on an old VIC-20 when I was 6, far before I had any concept of how to design a program properly or even how to connect the VIC-20 to the TV. Needless to say, my exposure to BASIC did me a world of good.
Hear me out, really.
It's very easy for novice users to fall into the trap that "Oh, I'm still programming, so stuff in C should work like BASIC". When they find that it doesn't, novice users tend to give up. Real "wizards", as I've heard Dijkstra quoted in this discussion, will easily be able to say "Ah, so that's how C differs. OK, that makes this part harder, but that part and that other part much easier." Then, once they know how to code, teach them design.
That being said, If I were in charge of a beginner's computing course, Perl would be taught first thing. Free, easy to write, and helps users learn good practices without gagging on less-than-stellar ones.
Oh, and GOTO has its uses, but it's nothing that can't be handled much better with a conveniently placed "if" block.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
This one used to tie people up for a few minutes...
10 PRINT "You are in a cave."
20 PRINT "Go N, S, E OR W?"
30 INPUT A$
40 GOTO 10
1. When I and many other people started out with computers, BASIC was the only game in town. Yes, there was assembler and other languages, but its easy to forget these days that information was hard to come by pre-web and indeed, for children who don't have the disposable income for specialist magazine subscriptions. Libraries typically had a couple of computer books, but these would be non-specific description books (that no longer exist as genre really) explaining that a computer had ROM, RAM and you could hook it up to a printer and a VDU! etc. etc. They had hand-drawn "screenshots" of space invaders and pac-man. BASIC was easy enough that we could get started without being put off. On Slashdot its easy to be intellectually macho, but theres a lot to be said for a low learning curve that encouraged you ever onward.
2. BASIC today. Well, its probably not for serious programmers. However, what is often forgotten here is that not everyone who programs is a professional programmer. Or wants to be. For very simple programs, GOTO is no sin. At least when the alternative is no program at all and, say, organising data in a text file by hand or "manually" in Excel or something. Bad habits are not a problem here, because one is never going to go on to have to write mission critical software in C or whatever. I know there are modern scripting languages that are perhaps just as easy to use, but you might be surprised how many people you might have thought have difficulty programming a VCR will break out QBASIC or VB when they need 20 line quicky knocking together and the programmers are "busy until further notice". Its easy to belittle this from a position of knowledge and authority, but relatively speaking these people are your friends in a landscape of PHBs that think programs just happen.
So in conclusion, BASIC is often better than nothing. That might sound like feint praise, but like I say, for the non-specialist that can be quite a valuable thing. Computer programming for the masses. Mock it at your peril.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
I am only 21 years old I remember in 7th grade we had to learn basic in our compute class. We had to program a small cartoon. My first program was a cartoon that showed Santa on top of a roof and a meteor hitting him as he climbed into the chimney (SP) HAHAHA it was GRREEEAAATT!!!
6. Profit!
Please, restrict your comments on Google's IPO to that thread.
8}
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Remember, that was about old BASIC dialects, not the embraced-and-extended-for-the-love-of-god-and-good -of-the-mankind Microsoft dialects.
Yeah, it's possible to do OO coding in Commodore 64 BASIC v2 if you do it right. *sigh*
Still, writing structured programs would be very cool if BASIC interpreters of those days would have supported things like return values, local variables and subroutine arguments... (You can GOSUB 2390 all you want, just don't expect the language to pass data around.)
we didn't have fancy languages like python or c++ or even basic. we had assembly language and we entered code using punched cards & we liked it!
Yes, I have RTFA. Yes, I have a girlfriend. Yes, I'm new here. And no, I don't want a free iPod.
OPTION BASE 0
Okay, this reminds me of the Parable of the Languages, a rather clever look at where programming has come from, and where the field is going to:
/ the-parable-of-the-languages.
If programming languages could speak, really speak, not just crunch bytes and stream bits, they would have much to say that is both wise and profound.
After all, the original programmers were philosophers, and programming languages were philosopher tools...
In Babble Meadow, in the twilight hours between day and night, when pesky noseeums float past on the breeze and birds rustle among leaves in preparation for bed, the programming languages would meet. And talk...
Read on at http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2002/10/08
Michael C. Hollinger
You probably know this, but most of those are a performance hack for if's with expressions that are either very likely to be true or very likely to be false.
On the other hand, the Win2K source code that leaked had very few goto's that I saw, but then again that wasn't the very low-level kind of stuff that Linux puts its goto's in.
All's true that is mistrusted
10 COMEFROM STROKIN
:STROKIN
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
People that make statements about GOTOs have never coded assembly in their life.
and if you have never really coded in assembler in some form YOU ARENT A REAL PROGRAMMER. THIS MEANS YOU SKRIPT KIDDI! drop the javascript book and back away from the keyboard!
While its not shipping with windows anylonger, a 'basic' compiler is again free.. If you want to download the *.net SDK..
Not commenting on if you want to or its quality, just that it exists again...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
10 PRINT "What do programmers who's jobs have been outsourced do during the day?"
20 LINE INPUT A$
30 PRINT "Wrong, they write basic programs and post them to slashdot"
40 END
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
You insensitive clod!
Wow, I never knew! I thought it's roots were in C++.
IOWs, someone check the article author's brain for unused cells. There's certain to be many.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
I am somewhat into programming language theory, and I have seen the pages of alternative languages... It looks to me like the "Hello World" program in one of the languages that just uses the primitive combinators.
But, what is funny: I paste it into google, and it says:
Heh... did I mean to use somewhat random-looking string of characters A, or did I really want somewhat random-looking string of characters B?
In most BASIC interpretations, "RENUM" will renumber your lines, providing even, 10-digit spacing between them.
Sorta.
:)
I had way too much free time one summer a few years ago, and started to write a dungeon-crawler game similar to the style of the MUD I frequent.
I forget why I finally gave up, but got pretty far along...Had a combat system that did dice rolls for weapon damage, random monsters, and a menu system for buying equipment, etc. Amazing what you can do if you're really determined and bored
If you're looking for a good version to play around with, check out QBasic 4.5 or 7.1 (off abandonware sites). It can use assembly libraries for graphics and stuff... I once wrote a windows clone using the DirectQB libraries. It can compile to .COM or .EXE too!
> Nothing stopping you from using structure in BASIC but your own mind.
That and the lack of FUNCTION in early versions.
The funny thing is that I started out with Basic back in the old days (for me), now I write quite capably in Assembly.
Ah BASIC, the first computer language to make me cry and swear at my Commodore 64.
BBC Computer 32K
Acorn DFS
BASIC
>_
First...
Private Sub Form_Load()
If (MsgBox("VB Is sweet?", vbYesNo) = vbYes) _
Then
MsgBox "Coooool"
End If
End Sub
or on the C64 (sorry, I can't make the "special characters")...
10 ? "Command shortcuts are fun"
20 gO 10
lI
rU
10 a=1
20 poke a,0
30 a=a+1
40 goto 20
all sorts of fun follows.
http://kered.org
lets start a nibbles tournament ;)
presmike
Proverbs 21:19
I was one of four students in a pilot program in 4th grade (1980) wherein we learned BASIC programming (Apple II) and "New Math" (don't even get me started.)
After learning the basics, I started my first project - a random text generator. I wanted to see if, left to its own devices, the Apple II would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare. Or at least, produce a few dirty words on its own.
I spent two days coding (never having used a keyboard before, typing was arduous)
The program went like this:
10 A=INT(RND(1)*30) +1
20 REM
30 IF A=1 THEN $B="A"
40 IF A=2 THEN $B="B"
...
340 IF A=30 THEN $B="."
350 PRINT $B;
360 GOTO 10
If I recall, there was no "copy" or "paste" function in the boot ROM AppleII BASIC. Typing this was hell on my 9-year-old fingers.
The good news is, the program worked. The bad news is, after I'd finished it, the teacher showed me how to cut 29 lines out of my program using the $CHR() function. I wanted to shoot him.
All in all, BASIC served me well. It's a great intro programming language for pre-teens.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
They created an Evil Empire! *DUM DUM DUMDUM* For, it was BASIC that gave Microsoft its start in life. Without BASIC MS would never have been built and Uncle Bill would be monopolizing timeshare condominiums or something.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The best BASIC in its time had to be BBC Microcomputer BASIC on the old Acorn BBC. It had useful features like procedures (think 'functions' or 'subroutines' in other languages) , so your code wouldn't be a whole heap of GOTO statements. It also had indirection operators for easy memory manipulation.
The BBC also had a 'Programmer Upgrade Path' - a built in 6502 assembler, and probably the best documented 8-bit OS in its time.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Internet's Java?
I'd be interested in knowing more about this. I always thought that Java was derived/inspired by C++. or is Internet Java different to Sun Microsystems's Java?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I kid you not...
The last shop I worked for ran BASIS PRO/5 on a big rs/6000 - this was a 250 million dollar company. It ran their rental business. Business Basic running on AIX. Complete with
Ready> prompt and line numbers. They still run it, put the system in production in 1998.
Yes, you read it right. Ready prompt and line numbers, interpreted basic ran a 250 million dollar company -
intepreted basic really let the vendor fix errors as they came up -
In 1990 I wrote software for realtime encoding and decoding of morse code using Amstrad CPC464 microcomputers, and hardware for connecting them (audio port to joystick port)
Describing this 10 years later to a British computer mag gave me letter-of-the-month status, winning myself a Taxan 19-inch monitor
So, thanks.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Harry McCracken, editor-in-chief of PC World magazine, laments BASIC's demise. "On some level I think it's sad that it went away," he said. "People went from being creators of software to consumers."
10 POKE RND(9999),RND(9999)
20 GOTO 10
You never knew what it would do! Sometimes nothing, sometimes it'd play music, sometimes it'd draw pictures! It was great!
That green slime had it coming.
Easier to use a language that supports proper structured programming.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think any fad involving basic could have been started as late as 1997. Qbasic, though not quite a footnote on basic, certainly is a late entry into the world of basic language variants, and by 1997 even Qbasic was pretty unbelievably old. Anybody worried about fitting basic into an ungodly huge 450KB (!!!) is pretty wasteful with space...
I'm somewhat of a latecomer to basic myself: I taught myself basic at home on a Commodore VIC-20 and at school on a PET, until the school replaced them with Apple ][e machines, and then when I was in 8th grade, just-released Apple ][gs machines.
You don't know memory limits until you discover that a Commodore VIC-20 had 3KB of user-available RAM!!! Even simple games like speedski barely fit. And of course the 22-column screen made typing programs a chore. The C64 with the 80-column card was a prize for sure - it had over 50K available to the user, and an 80-column display with 8 colors.
One thing I always liked about basic though, was that all the different variants (Timex/sinclair, Commodore, Apple, HP, etc), despite a lack of any desire to follow any inherent standards, were close enough that with a little acquaintance and/or any of the monthly magazines full of programs and hints, it was possible to write a program for any of them. And the laborious man-hours of manually copying code from a magazine into a computer meant that I knew how to properly type by my seventh birthday.
Anyway, you can keep your Qbasic games of 1997, by which time there were all sorts of really *good* games being developed for real hardware using real languages. If I'm going to play basic games, I'll take speed ski, snake race, avenger, and the like.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
Damn it! Now that you've reminded me of basic I had to install a basic interpreter and now I'm going to sit and relearn basic. So much for getting some work done today!
This statement is forty-five characters long.
BASIC...
TI-99/4A.. learning BASIC.. good times...
Been a long day today, but nice to have a minil vacation, remembering the good ole days...
have a nice day ya'll
One of my first real programs in Qbasic was a text adventure. And since at that time all I knew about programming I had learn from the help-function, you can imagine I wouldn't like having that code showing up again.
> It was something like that. It basically wrote 0's to the memory until the PC shit itself and crashed.
I remember when I only had 16k to play with on my TI 99/4A. I saved all summer to get the expansion box and the extra 16k cardie. If I had invested that money, I would rich today! But I'm a poor jobless bastard....
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I love that bastard child of Basic that MS hides in the windows folder. I love throwing banannas at monkeys.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The program's source is the haiku, not its output.
50 goto x*100+1000
And of course x is a float not an integer. Ahh those were the days...
This technique of course requires very carefull line numbering of different parts of the code but it's wicked fast and defies any attempt at reverse engineering.
TCAP-Abort
MySQL *shouldn't* be used for anything serious.
There should be a hippocratic oath for data integrity 'first do no harm'.
MySQL mangles data in various ways.
Horrible flaming death by returning errors is preferrable to data mangling.
http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html
Read it. Be enlightened.
well, you can write your activation code generator in BASIC-80 if you are using Kagi for your software sales.
Microsoft(R) Windows 98
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1981-1999.
C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>mbasic
Bad command or file name
-- DAMN! Where'd it go!?!
Whenever I watch something dubbed from Japanese into English, it seems like the voice-over actors have to talk a hundred miles an hour to get their lines into the allotted time. So I've always assumed Japanese has a much higher information-to-syllables ratio. And it made me want to see a Japanese-to-Spanish dub...they'd have to talk twice as fast as that.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
You should replace 30 - 60 with:
30 ON I GOTO 100, 120, 140, 70
And then there is the matter of range checking...
(Damn, I'm a nerd.)
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
(define (cube-of (x))
(* x (* x (* x 1))))
(+ (cube-of 2) 9)
Evaluate that to get the number of syllables in a haiku. ^_^
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
10 REM The trs-80 will return
20 PRINT "BEST HEADLINE EVER";
30 GOTO 10
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Should be:
(define (cube-of x)
(* x (* x (* x 1))))
(+ (cube-of 2) 9)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I disagree. Dijkstra is credited with numerous important fundamental algorithms, so he most certain "can". This isn't to say that he isn't arrogant, or that there aren't arrogant professors who "can't". This is to say there are those who are arrogant, and "can".
I have no problems at all with you criticizing various things he said or stood for. Just because he is smart enough to discover algorithms doesn't mean that he is beyond reproach. However, to say he "can't" I'm tempted to ask what you have done for computer science.
You know, come to think of it, I did once, way back when. I wrote it on my HP 86A in HPBASIC (for those of you worndering, this was is back in early 80's). I called it "Von Harth's Castle" (I believe the name was inspired by a favorite boardgame of mine at the time called "Valkenburg's Castle"). If memory serves it was three levels and roughly 30 "rooms" or so. I remember spending quite a lot of time writing the command parser so that the player could type regular english sentences.
:). It was much better than my previous game, "Pizza Boy", which was not only much simpler, but had a disturbingly pornographic title.
Von Harth's Castle was my masterpiece at the time
I think I still have that computer around here somewhere and it might actually work. I wonder how much luck I'll have reading a 20 year old floppy...
hmm, i see a problem, 2004-1963!=40. Something is wrong with this picture...
I remember learning to program with Basic at the age of 10, which eventually lead me to a career as a Java developer. Given the complexities of programming languages now, I wonder how many kids/future programmers have the know how to write even simple programs. I know Java would have been way to overwhelming for me at that age!
10 OUT &h64,&hfe
it's used millions of times a day to destroy windows users' data.
You can blame basic all you want for bad coding habits, and you would be foolish to do so.
Structurally, the flow control of basic (GOTOs and GOSUBS) is a LOT closer to x86 assembly language than any OO language. It's just the way the CPU was made.
If the CPU developers throw away 40 years of chip design, and make an Object Oriented assembly language, then you can spout off about methods and functions being beter than GOTOs and GOSUBS.
I got introduced to BASIC by a teletype in my 7th grade math class in the mid 70s. Our teacher did a week on probability and statistics and we capped off that phase by playing blackjack on the computer which was hooked up to the HP2000C/F mainframe at the local Junior College via a leased line (I'm guessing 300 baud).
At the tender age of 12, I was completely enthralled with the technology. I asked the teacher if he had any books on programming, but all he had were the HP BASIC syntax manuals. I happily borrowed those and memorized the lion's share of the commands and started coding. BASIC was so straightforward that you need only program in a logical manner and you were churning out working code in no time.
I spent many hours at the computer lab in that local Junior College, churning through reams of paper at the disdain of the scuffy bearded sysadmins. I wrote simple games, I wrote complex games.
The game de jeur at the time was Star Trek, where you traversed your ASCII Enterprise through a matrix of sectors and saved the galaxy from the evil Klingons. I managed to snag the source code to it and despite all my BASIC coding for the last few years, most of how they coded it made no sense to me. Curious as to what the difference would be, I dove into writing my own version of Star Trek, a nearly identical work alike. The code was about 1/4 the number of lines, although it wasn't quite as fast. Still, I was pretty proud of the achievement as it was by far the largest program I'd ever written.
Those early days of BASIC slinging taught me alot about logic flow and how programs operate and pass data. Much of what I learned way back when still applies to my daily work. I don't sling code anymore, I turned away from that path 20 years ago. These days I do QA work and I work with Engineers and code all the time.
If BASIC hadn't provided those opportunities for me way back then, I wouldnt' be doing what I do now (which in some cases might be a good thing) and I sure as hell wouldn't know NEAR as much about computing as I do now, be it programming logic, networking or any related technology.
Sure, people laugh at BASIC now days. It's practically just a scripting language compared to modern languages. From it's very name it was never meant to be the king, but, at least for me, it served a very important foundational role in my technical development.
I look back upon the spilled paper tape hole bin days with a nostalgic fondness and smile.
Hah! Basic. Real men use a real programming language
(yes, this is a joke)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
#include
//Muhahaha!
void main(void)
{
printf("I shall never surrender!");
}
Or maybe he was making a joke? Oops .. I forgot ... a sense of humour is not allowed when pontificating about a language.
Those who blast BASIC in its incarnations should check out what the boys at Dartmouth did to the language. TrueBasic is a very rendition that handles graphics, matix math and even OOP with good programming practices. I have used it for image analysis work and its pretty powerful
http://www.truebasic.com
That is its biggest strength.
:-) Once you introduce a kid to the concepts of do loops, for loops and if..then statements, it is so much easier to learn a complicated language like C. It's a pity you don't have QBASIC shipping with Windows machines any more. Vbscripting is not at the same intuitive level.
I remember how I got into programming in school - we had these BBC computers which could run BASIC. The language was simple enough for me to understand and intuitive enough for me to actually like programming. (Before that I had seen an aunt learn COBOL and the very look of the language frightened me)
Sure, BASIC is not as advanced as C, BASIC uses GOTO statements, BASIC (not QBASIC though) uses archaic line numbers (but still not as archaic as the Fortran 77 tradition of having to write everything after 7 spaces), but BASIC is the best tool to introduce an enthusiastic person to the world of programming. See this example: In BASIC you would show the person:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 END
Bingo, the person magically sees his first program work. Try the same thing with C:
#include
int main(){
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}
See how much more you have to explain? Ever tried to explain stdio.h and int main to someone?
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Am I the only one who felt that BASIC was the worst thing for teaching programming? That set me back quite a bit as a kid with the idiocy of line numbers and GOTO.
Beginner's
All-purpose
Symbolic
Instruction
Code
Note the emphasis on Beginner's.
Served me quite well in high school...<sigh/>
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Nevermind things like Dijkstra's algorithm, but I digress.
Your example is a very good one. However, German and French are very closely related, whereas BASIC and other high-level languages are not. What I propose instead is to look at how difficult it is for native English speakers to speak Russian or Japanese fluently. Unless you had exposure to them early on in your language development or are a natural linguist, they are going to be extremely difficult and take years just to reach basic proficiency.
Computer languages are similar. Basic encourages lack of planning, arbitrary code flows with no special layout, skanky hacks (only exceeded by C-style pointer arithmetic), and horrible scoping and variable naming. You have to first unlearn these bad habits before you can really appreciate the good habits of C and higher languages, not to mention the huge philisophical difference between statement, procedural, and object-oriented languages.
I hate to say it, but if you are seriously defending BASIC, you are (as another post said) either ignorant of computer science and any concepts of software engineering or are extraordinarily set in your ways.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Ahhhh, the good old days. It brings back memories or BASIC programming and playing the original Prince of Perisa in DOS on an IBM machine.
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
Ah, geez. I'm standing right here, sir.
- Willy
I don't understand the story - does this mean I'm not cut out for janitorial work?
I'm sure many of you remember messing around with QBASIC, the free version of QuickBASIC that was distributed with MS-DOS.
:)
There's currently a petition running online to get Microsoft to release all their BASIC compilers as freeware. Please help support the hobbyists by signing the petition!
http://www.petitiononline.com/qbasicp/
When I vacationed in Canada a few years ago, I took my TI-83 to convert currency and measurements for me. But, I found an even bigger need during the trip... converting CDN$ per litre of "petrol" to USD per gallon of gas. Things made a lot more sense at the pump.
I've still got my QBASIC 4.5 ... I think the last time I used it was in '96 to crank out a custom text-parsing executable for a 386 to plow through 2mb file.
.. good times, good times ...
Ahhhhh
m.mmm..myyy
Dijkstra was in a good position to be arrogant.
He "did" as well as taught - you might like to read up on him a bit before putting your foot in your mouth.
And, incidentally, good teachers are worth a thousand "arrogant" programmers who think they know better.
D.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
I believe the lack of a good version of the BASIC language is what is holding back Linux in a small manner. Microsoft, by making it easy to customise their regular applications (via VBScript) and write new applications (via VB), allowed companies and individuals to quickly roll out software for both profit and fun. Until Linux has this ability, we will continue to be a second-level player in many circles.
Fortunately, we do have a couple of languages that allow (after a sort) RAD software development - Perl, Python, and Tcl/Tk are all excellent languages for today's business application development. However, they lack the GUI IDE that has made VB what it is - the ability to rapidly slap together a form and some code behind controls, compile and run with a single click - and BAM! - an instant GUI application! Furthermore, none of these languages (ok, the exception would likely be Python) are as easy to learn as BASIC, and Python only wins out because it looks and feels a lot like BASIC in many respects.
I just don't understand the hatred people have of BASIC - it's a language syntax, people! I have often wondered how hard it would be to make a simplified version of BASIC that could be easily parsed/converted by Perl to C, then compiled with gcc (basically, it would be C, but with a lot of BASIC "look" to it). GOTO's were banished a long, long time ago. BASIC could easily be object-oriented - it's just a syntax.
Something makes me think people dislike BASIC because of the idea that it would make them less of programmers by using it (f'd up pyschology or something, I think) or knowing it. All it would do is make them faster programmers - as long as it compiles down to native, why not make the syntax of the language as simple as possible, provided it gets the job done. BASIC can do this!
Finally, there are some "good" BASIC's out there for Linux - one is XBasic, the other is Blassic. XBasic is a form of BASIC that looks and acts like a cross between VB, C and QBasic - fairly fast, compiles to native, and open-source (GPL, I believe) to boot!
Blassic is what could be called "classic BASIC" - fairly easy to port stuff from GWBASIC and some QBasic over to it. It is done pretty well (though the documentation could use some work/updating - I put out an update a long time ago while playing with it) - it is interpreted, but it runs very fast on today's systems, plus it has some extra features old BASICs didn't. Search for both of these with Google - I think you will be surprised at what is out there!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
...the PC revolution would have been a lot less revolutionary, if it happened at all.
The simple, limited, but comprehensible BASIC found in all those Apples, Commodores, Ataris, TI's, etc., showed people that even they could control a computer.
BASIC is about putting ordinary people in charge of their computers, not corporations...or crusading free software elitists whose idea of "ordinary people" are 1982 MIT graduates.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I had an XT, which gave me a ROM BASIC error when you put in the wrong floppy disk, and people told me theres a BASIC interpreter in there somewhere in the BIOS.
Did anyone ever get into the ROM BASIC?
Much later there was the venerable GWBASIC on MSDOS 3.0 floppies. Gotta love those random colors, siren sounds and the predictibility!
Now you build a simple println type visual basic program, it takes its while on a Pentium3 1GHz, and gives you the BSOD.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I would like to draw Slashdot readers' attention to the GNU/Liberty Basic Compiler Collection as a free alternative to proprietary implementations.
You can read more about the GNU project at http://www.gnu.org/.
Did you know that Commodore 64 BASIC V2 was based on a dialect written by Microsoft.
Virus infects both Windows and Linux!
There was a game called Space Warp for the TRS-80 model I, II and III's in the early '80's.
Dude, that game ruled.
If it's out there, let me know where I could possibly get it.
Chalupa
40 years hence is a good time to kill it, burn it, and scatter the ashes to the four winds.
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
for (;;) {
puts("ajs318 is a tard.");
}
return 0;
}
10 PRINT Home 20 PRINT Sweet 30 GOTO 10
Have you seen the Movie? Bill Murry does a commercial in Japan. The Japanese director give a long impassioned speech in Japanese with a lot of gesturing. A Japanese woman translates for Bill, "Please turn to the left." Its classic.
No one said anything about BASIC being an acceptable language, idiot. Only that exposure to it is not irreparably harmful.
... was TrueBASIC. Wait, you meant real languages? PRINT "Rodent"
Man i forgot about basic.. it is annoying that I can still write in it. 10 rem piss of teacher 20 for x= 1 to 10000 30 if x = 10000 then goto 60 40 next x 50 goto 20 60 ? (apple g) 70 goto 60 in applesoft basic apple g was a beep and ? was shorthand for print. I would write this at the end of class turn off the monitor and sometime during the next class period the computer would start beeping constantle.. wow I am a dork...
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
All of these can be started as an editor, eg QBASIC / EDCOM
On the other hand, only vers 1.1 can read the dos help file HELP.HLP.
Amusingly, Windows understands what a QHELP file is, that if you click on a quickbasic help file, it says 'this is a DOS help file', whereas any other help file (eg 4dos.hlp), it says "unknown format".
In any case, basic shipped with msdos, because in older times, computers had a rom-basic in their bios.
GWBASIC is a standalone emulator for graphical workstations (ie workstations that replaced the rom-basic with video memory).
BASIC in its raw form continues to affect the way that COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE work. For example, if one does a test, and it is false, the rest of the line is skipped. In the sample below, we see two statements, separated by an &. If one makes the if statement, one gets neither command, while if the statement is true, both work.
One can implement a die style command by this, or by replacing echo with set, pass a parameter to a subroutine.In any case, it's dodgy.OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Here's An interesting article by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, inventors of BASIC
I'm only 20 years old.
But the first time I ever learned to program anything was an original IBM PC (dual floppy drives and a monocrome display), using BASIC
If I wanted to run serious software is was DOS 2.x.
If I wanted something more modern (and eating up all the available memory), we had 3.x.
And now, I'm still a student, but using PHP, mySQL, XUL, JS, C++, and many other acronyms.
Because of those bastards, now I'm being forced to program in VB (sigh)!
No, Bill didn't create it. Sadly, they created something simple enough that Bill could implement it. We've all been suffering from that decision for a long time.
... someone jogged the power cable! (Again!)
Ahh the nostalgia ...
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
What do I look like, your mother? Use Google!
Here is the ROM:
http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-3m.htm
Here is the emulator:
http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-e.htm
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
10 HOME
20 SWEET
30 GOTO 10
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
Damn you Sludge Vohaul!
Roger Wilco
Well my /. ID is four digits!!!
Nyah!
what?
how?
sorry.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I had no time to hate, because
by Emily Dickinson
I had no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.
Nor had I time to love, but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.
When I was playing around with BASIC a long time ago, besides the details GWBASIC manuals from Microsoft, the other book that I really enjoyed was 1001 Things To Do With Your IBM PC. That book described so many things that could be done with BASIC. Best of all, it was not a listing of complete programs but rather tools and program snippets combined with ideas for building cool programs.
Yeah, and if you read up on him, you'll find out that he made his contributions to the field in the 60's and 70's, and then shunned computers for the remainder of his life (he wouldn't let the University of Texas put one in his office, for example, and he never used email).
Dijkstra was a mathematician, not a programmer. His whole concept of "structured" programming was not designed to foster readability or stability in software, it was to make software "provable" like some sort of mathematical equation.
Dijkstra was brilliant, yes, but why on earth should people take as gospel what he or anyone else who hasn't written a practical, production-level piece of software in their entire lives have to say about good programming style?
I really wish people would quote someone like Steve McConnell or Andrew Hunt the next time someone talks about software design, instead of some eccentric mathematician who loved pen and paper and despised the keyboard and mouse.
So......
:P
If it was a C interpeter instead of a BASIC interpeter, would you be saying the exact same thing? Probably moreso.
It's been a long time.
Who in the what now?
I'd say defaming BASIC as you are, that you are either ignorant of modern BASIC dialects or are extraordinarily stubborn about Cs superiority to all things ever...
It's been a long time.
Remembering that me and my brother sometime around 1988 (we were 10 years) typed a program from the manual into our commandore 64. In basic naturally.
:-/
The program was pretty long (or at least we felt so) but after a while we were finally finished!
But we couldn't figure out how to start it. We checked the manual like a 100 times, but didn't find any solution. So eventually, we had to turn it off...bummer!
Later we learned that we just should've typed in the command "Run".
Don't you think that when you look at your Perl code?
Sorry...cheap shot...couldn't resist.
Compiled BASIC, with functions, procedures, case structures, record types, local variables, etc. has been around about 25 years.
You can write a program in MS-BASIC that's as well structured as any other language.
If done correctly, BASIC is a remarkably readable language. And just about any BASIC created in the last 20 years has the features of FORTRAN and COBOL.
Well if the guy says you can't learn proper programming if you've learned basic, then he's categorically wrong on that point.
I'd seriously defend VB.NET if you really wanted me to.
What I want to say is, by all means encourage "better" languages. But be damn careful you don't discourage the use of Basic if someone is happy with it. Exposure through macro programming could be the shakey foundation of confidence being built on. You could be killing the whole deal. That would be my definition of doing someone "no favours". Python is perhaps more desirable, but as I say, BASIC is better than nothing.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
French and Germane are closely related?
WHAT!
You must have meant English and German are closely related... Phonetically speaking at least! Many roots are common to both of these languages.
French sure doesn't sound like English or German...
True: German and French give genders to most objects , as opposed to English for which only neutral exists, but that's about where the similarities end.
As for English vs French, English sure did borrow lot of word from French, transformed them and are now given back to French in another form.
Think about barbecue as an example: it's an old French word which (literally) meant: "from the beard through to the ass" (barbe au cul), referring to the stick on which the animal (be it a pig, or whatever else) was impaled for cooking. English people couldn't pronounce it properly so they changed it to the spelling that is known today: barbecue.
There's about as many similarities between French and German as there are between Ada and C: both of them are languages but their syntax, culture and philosophy differ... Greatly in both cases!
10 print "Home"
20 print "Sweet"
30 goto 10
MOV AX, 0B800h
MOV DS, AX
MOV [52h], 'A'
MOV [54h], 'S'
MOV [56h], 'M'
MOV [5Ah], 'R'
MOV [5Ch], 'o'
MOV [5Eh], 'c'
MOV [60h], 'k'
MOV [62h], 's'
MOV [64h], '!'
INT 20h
I remember doing my first simple math calculating programs in basic. Then getting more serious in high school realizing I could use the language to help "check" my math work (I'm serious I only used it for checking....).
Then came an attempt to recreate a pac-man like game. Very ugly code but it worked to an extent.
Even today for very quick logic testing or Windoze scripting BASIC still holds a place dear to my heart/head being the first language I learned.
Also to those who despise GOTO with a passion I was one of the few people in my Assembly language class capable of understanding an unconditional jump when it came time for the branch commands (and I proceeded to run circles around those poor pathetic fools).
Good programmers drink beer to relieve job stress.
Great programmers drink hard liquor and work best hungover.
I used to sit in a cubicle programming in BASIC and now I'm a janitor you insensitive clod!
I wish I could write some humorous BASIC code like the rest of you, but I was just too l33t for BASIC: I skipped right up to C++.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
BASIC's text munging sux compared to Perl's, that's all I was saying.
I'm a school janitor, I read slashdot, I can program better than you can, and my wife is hot too.
tThese and many of other modern "real" languages are very BASICish the syntax is generally the same. The main difference is the change in program structure over the years and more advanced features.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
10 for a=1 to 2 do
20 print "Happy Birthday To Me!"
30 next a
40 print "Happy Birthday Beginners All Purpose Instruction Language"
50 print "Happy Birthday To Me!"
60 end
From those very days, try BBC BASIC:
a rameters)
LOCAL variable
DEF PROCedure(formal_parameters)
DEF FNctn(formal_parameters)
ENDPROC
FNctn(actual_p
PROCedure(actual_parameters)
All variants of Basic should be banned. It just isn't code.
...clearly doesn't know a thing about the Japanese language. :-p
Technique for programming in Basic: simulate Turing machine
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
When I was 11-12, I learned to program in BASIC after reading an adventure book my grandma bought for me. I did not have a computer, so I wrote the games in a textbook (later retyped themn on a DVK (that was ripped of some British machine by the USSR).) The book was great, it started me coding, in it I had to solve short problems in order to continue the story (the story in itself was a very large algorythm.) Without solving the problems I could not continue the story but the story was interesting enough for me to want to continue reading it, so I learned to solve the problems on paper.
BASIC is great because you do not need a computer to feel confident that you have gotten the program right, especially for a novice. I guess Assembly would have worked the same way, but it is more cryptic, so I am glad I learned it later.
You can't handle the truth.
The is the 21st century. The BASIC of our age is PHP.
.html file to .php and carefully inserting their first PHP tag into it. "Hello, world" often is or for many.
Many people are making their first ventures into the world of programming by renaming a
Any not just young people - buy webspace, get PHP is the standard now over here, and why not try it, if it is so simple.
Rasmus, Zeev and Andy, they really deserve much good karma for creating the language that made web programming accessible to so many.
I've never understood why you use a for loop for something like that and not a "while (1)". Can someone clue me in?
Some compilers give a warning for not having a conditional expression as the clause. for (;;) never does.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
It does support structured programing.
Read my comment.
However I admit using a goto to a line number is tempting. BUt I can also use goto's in C.
http://saveie6.com/
But later, BASIC facilitated an (extremely sketchy) introduction to the Macintosh toolbox. MS-BASIC on the mac had built-in pseudo toolbox calls so that you could change fonts, draw graphics primitives and buttons.
Did you know M$-QuickBASIC? I made my first Mac applications on it. Years later (after going through the hassle of coding scrollbars from scratch with C and the Mac Toolbox's Control Manager) I looked at that code again and found it very efficient. You could handle a lot of UI elements with only a few calls.
Having got to know pointers (and so-called handles) in Pascal and C, I realized I had been using them in QuickBASIC without even remotely understanding the concept behind it. It was just "a variable containing an image" or whatever.
Pointers started with a percent sign, handles with an ampersand.
I wonder whether you could implement a Java Virtual Machine in BASIC? Probably yes. Would it be efficient? Probably no.
PS2s in PAL regions come with a demo disk that has, in addition to the playable and rollong demos, a port of YABASIC (Yet Another BASIC). Apparently this was because of a tax dodge in the UK, where computers are taxed at a lower rate than games consoles, but in order to classify the PS2 as a computer SCEE had to include a programming language with it.
Dijkstra reminds me of my thermodynamics teacher, who used to make remarks like "you can't understand thermodynamics unless you begin with astrophysics." He was a Nobel prizewinner, but he was also a {censored because he's still alive and might conceivably read this}.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yeah, I knew. I recently heard Commodore wasn't very kind to companies it got tech from... they apparently had some moves that even Microsoft thinks are too evil to do =) (One story was that they purposefully didn't pay their bills, which lead to companies going bankrupt and Commodore then bought them cheap.)
Of course, it's pretty lucky Microsoft isn't getting credit for the BASIC interpreter. I mean, those BASICs at the time that proudly displayed "(c) Microsoft" were really cool (think of Spectravideo or MSX). Commodore BASIC was crap in comparison.
Until the late 1990s, I was under the impression Microsoft was doing good BASIC interpreters until I heard Commodore BASIC was of their doing =)
When you think that is true, you really have not seen any of the original BASIC.
Sure, many derivatives of the language has been created and some of them resemble the languages you name, but the original BASIC structure and syntax was very different.
I regard Dijkstra's comment more as a fun phrase about something that is "basically" true: basic programmers are harder to teach in modern methodologies, they develop bad habits that have to be overcome. It's not that they are literally mentally crippled, but it takes longer for them to program "the correct way".
The problem is that Dijkstra was one of the fathers of computing. Remember the algorithm after his name? Just a fun phrase and it becomes a quotation.
But C64 BASIC was a Microsoft BASIC. Just not a very good one, that's all.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
The Beatles meant a revolution to popular music in their time. Even when they disappeared long ago, their influences are still present in today music, and their records are still widely sold.
Before modding me off-topic: do you catch the meaning?
BTW: I still use, maintain and improve a Quick-BASIC 4.5 program I wrote nine years ago. The reason? Portability: each machine I work with has an MS-DOS emulator! Talk about "write once, run everywhere!" Oh, and it's faster than Java, too :-P
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
REM statements were nice and terse, or nonexistant, again to save memory.
All that notwithstanding, the very worst thing about BASIC was global variables. Even at the age of twelve, I knew that there was something wrong with being able to scribble any variable from anywhere in the program. So I learned to use the variables S0--S9 for "S"ubroutines and A0--A9 for "A"nywhere, "G" variables for graphics, that sort of thing.
So here's what I learned: When I was first exposed to a "real" language (at 18 or so), I was thrilled to have local variables, and "named subroutines" (as I thought of functions at the time). No longer could one part of a program smash another part (at least, not until I started using C). No longer would I have to keep a big table of variable names and line numbers to keep my program organized. No longer would I have to renumber everytime I inserted a line of code. No longer would I have to keep careful track which variable was unused at a given moment---if I couldn't use it, it wasn't in scope.
Oh, what a happy boy I was. I learned how to be pathalogically organized in my code. I learned, well, the BASICs. Nothing like a few years on a Schwinn Pixie to make a boy appreciate a new five speed---I learned the basics of riding, but now I could really fly. Structured programming (and later, OOP) rocked. And a few years ago when I had to do some assembly language programming for a project, the careful habits I picked up in BASIC served me well. So that's what I learned from BASIC: to appreciate the power and organizational abilities of a real language. I still hate C++, but that's another story.
This is not my sandwich.
10 FOR I = 1 TO 8
20 PRINT "NINNLE";
30 NEXT I
40 PRINT "BATMAN!!"
50 END
That 'BASIC Training' section was the last, sad remnant of a standalone CTW magazine called 'ENTER', which was sort of like a 'Wired for Kids' publication with a much larger programming section than the 3-2-1 Contact 'BASIC Training'. Lots of great computer-related articles, and each month they would publish cool programs submitted by other kids. I always wished I was l337 enough to get one of my BASIC masterpieces in there.
::sigh:: I still have all of my copies of ENTER kicking around somewhere (Remember the one with Sting on the cover, when Dune was coming out in the theater?), but there seems to be a surprising dearth of ENTER fan pages online.
I still remember how sad/betrayed I felt when I read that last issue of ENTER, in which they announced that they were going to cram the entire magazine into about 3 pages of 3-2-1 Contact.
@#(*&>>@#*()& At least that is what perl looks like to me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
How did that work out for you, I've heard them(Landmark Forum) reviled as a cult and acclaimed as the next best thing since seven habits.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Now that was a good idea, wasn't it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"using the 'print', 'let', 'if/then', 'goto', and 'input' statements you can create ANY program."
for me, this is the difference between software engineering and anything else.
This is Gianfranco from GBGames. I haven't actually updated my website in a long time, but I reviewed Lianne at one point.
If you check out http://www.hulla-balloo.com/vplanet and http://www.qbasicnews.com you can see that there is still plenty of active development in QB.
Ah, the good ol' days...
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
Dijkstra is in the category of people that can DO and TEACH. He created the first Operating System using multiprogramming techniques called THE and its architecture based in layers was copied by every other OS since then (like UNIX). The article that presented it also introduced semaphores. P.S. in "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ ewd498.html), BASIC doesnt seens to receives worse treatment than PL/I, COBOL or APL.
while (notdoneA) {
while (notdoneB} {
...
while (notdoneZ) {
...
}}}...