On 2019-08-16 11:52 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| I've been spending more time with BASIC on Linux than I should recently.
Why? Legacy code?
I thought you knew me well enough never to ask why, Hugh.
I cannot think of anything better done in BASIC rather than in Python or Logo. And that's just for things in BASIC's niche.
Find me a computer that booted from ROM into a Python or Logo REPL and I might believe you. There are some new tiny computer-like things shipping with MicroPython in flash, but Python lacks exuberance. No-one ever stayed up late trying to pack a Python program into a single < 255 character line limit because they could*.
I have to admit that a good implementation of a bad language is often more useful than a bad implementation of a good language.
BASIC isn't a bad language even if EWD had a hate-on for it. It's one of those get-the-job-done practical languages like Fortran, Cobol and Perl that seem to annoy computer scientists. I mean, you've got to love a language that when you ask it to reserve 10 array items it gives you 11, just so FOR i=1 TO 10 and FOR i=0 TO 9 won't fail … BASIC isn't rigidly defined, beyond a tiny subset lacking any useful library (ANSI X3.60-1978, with accompanying test suite NBS SP 500-70). It took Microsoft five versions before they hit that standard, just so they could sell BASIC systems to the US federal government. There is a current ISO BASIC standard, but I don't quite have enough interest to shell out the $$$ to find out what it includes. cheers, Stewart *: this one-liner, running in an emulated BBC Micro in a browser, remains one of my favourite games: <https://bbc.godbolt.org/?autorun&loadBasic=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/scruss/8ba31a3fc154042285d21cf7ffdfff69/raw/9007afc9d252f4866f93cfc8f474b1d8ea6a76ee/ASTER> (caution: loud beep at start. Hold Return to climb, let go to not-climb. Don't hit anything you can see. Space restarts. The game's called Asterisk Tracker, and was a major reason for broken Return keys and unfinished computer homework in the 1980s in the UK.)