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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Obviously they failed, and so they created BASIC instead.
... BASIC's much acclaimed successor, Visual Basic ;-)
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
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
10 PRINT "I hearby declare..."
20 PRINT "that all comments in this story"
30 PRINT "be typed in basic"
40 END
Obviously their arithmatic algorithm was flawed
. there used to be a sig here.....
It is notoriously easy to create off-by-one bugs in BASIC :-(
-Peter
"Learning BASIC causes permanent brain damage." -- E.Dijkstra
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
um, how is the parent offtopic?
In other news, slashdot submitters use a Pentium to calculate important historical dates.
plurvet
ILLEGAL FUNCTION CALL
10 PRINT "YOU FAIL IT!"
20 GOTO 10
(note to mods: this is funny; please moderate accordingly)
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
10 PRINT "Concived: 1963"
20 PRINT "Born: 1964"
30 END
Which you obviously didn't do very well. You don't even have a command in that!
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
yeah, i know, i tried to reply to the post, calling myself an idiot. apparently i'm even too stupid to reply to a post :o)
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
That is because array indexes start at 1 instead of zero. So it's really 41 years if you start from year one.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Better than your spelling algorithm.
No, Dijkstra has it right; there are styles one should use and styles one should not. BASIC forces you to use the latter. This must later be beaten out of you if you are to become proficient.
Your seeming moral ambiguity about the styles one can use spring from a personal coping mechanism attemptimg to rationalize your bad habits as valid. They are not.
Or something.
RinkRat
Hey, I have a great idea! Add an extension to C/C++ so you can put BASIC snippets inline. This would infuriate more than enough people, making it a worthwhile effort.
...
10 ? "CmdrTaco and Kathleen stting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G";
15 ? CHR$(7)
20 goto 10
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
WHY! WON'T! IT! DIE!
probably because someone stuck a "goto 10" before the "end"
10 PRINT "Happy Birthday to you"
11 PRINT "Happy Birthday to you"
12 PRINT "Happy Birthday dear BASIC"
13 END
Dammit... Missed out a line. Now I remember why I should always increment line numbers by 10.
[biteme@bender biteme]$ x=1; while x=1; do echo "First Post"; done
First Post
First Post
First Post
First Post
First Post
.
.
.
.
.
"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.
10 PRINT "Concived: 1963"
20 PRINT "Born: 1964"
30 END
25 PRINT "Spell checked: Never"
RUN
Syntax Error "PROFIT!"
-------------------^
Command Not Found "PROFIT"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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"
I miss line numbers and GOTO
True friends are hard to come by... I need more money. - Calvin
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!
It could still be worse... (from the Fortune database):
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10: SIMPLE
SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language
Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for
Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code
with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN,
END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make
a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus
they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without
the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.
Odd, I thought it was because BillG only knew how to write in Basic, so the company had to keep a basic product alive so he could do some programming too.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
45 IF $ARTICLE="BASIC" GOSUB 60 //e IN APPLE BASIC! I COULD MAKE BAD GRAPHICS AND ASCII ART ALL DAY WITH MY 80 COLUMN EXPANSION CARD!"
60 PRINT "COOL! I USED TO PROGRAM ON MY APPLE
70 GOTO 50
CVS
free ipod and free gmail!
Don't forget to PEEK before you POKE!
I didn't know you could insert hyperlinks into BASIC programs... Guess I missed that last update. =P
I think Microsoft's BASIC was GW-BASIC, which I was told stands for Gates, William (Bill)
This one used to tie people up for a few minutes...
10 PRINT "You are in a cave."
20 PRINT "Go N, S, E OR W?"
30 INPUT A$
40 GOTO 10
Haiku in English is dumb
Add last line next time
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!
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?
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
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.
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.
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".