From: j DOT aldrich6 AT genie DOT com
Message-Id: <199607050346.AA040458418@relay1.geis.com>
Date: Fri,  5 Jul 96 03:28:00 UTC 0000
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Subject: Re: in Defense of BASIC

Reply to message 2919860    from ORLY AT GIBSON DOT E on 07/04/96  9:11PM


>That's not strictly true
>(leap to the defense of my once-favorite language :)

Hey, mine too - I just hate it now.  :)

>Perhaps you're under the impression that all BASIC programmers are
>high-school, no, primary-school nerds with GOTO's sticking out of their
>pocket protectors  :)

Not at all!  But considering that Lauren stated that the last time she used
BASIC was 10 years ago, I felt justified in making that assumption.  :)

>I happen to have used BASIC a lot, and for *some* things it's better than
>C (heresy, I hear the cries!) such as simple string manipulation. I won't
>argue with you over the efficiency of these -- go talk to the Perl
>hackers.

I honestly haven't used a super-modern version of BASIC.  I know that
when I moved from BASIC to Pascal, I wept over the loss of my awesome
string manipulating power.  But then I found C, and discovered that I
no longer lamented.

>Anyway, I don't use BASIC right now, but as far back as 1987, QuickBASIC
>4.0 from Micro$oft had structures, functions, procedures, the rest of that
>stuff. In fact, I only gave up on it because I discovered that (a) Turbo C
>was three times as fast; (b) having no pointers was a major headache.

I am well aware of that.  However, it seems to me that using anything
more complicated than a gosub is majorly stretching the intended
fabric of the BASIC language.

>Actually, my own language progression was BASIC-->QuickBASIC-->Pascal-->C
>The "modern" structured BASIC's (and some of the ones for workstations,
>like HP Basic, are really cool and have matrix operators and stuff) are
>really very close to Pascal in syntax and are just as strongly-typed. Even
>Visual Basic now requires you to declare all variables. And the crappy '$'
>for strings is no longer necessary or required.

Dunno - the last BASIC I used was QuickBASIC.  I went straight from Atari
BASIC to Pascal in high school, played with QuickBASIC for a little while,
then moved straight into C when I got to college.  :)

>So, if you're a Pascal person and you want to have an easy life, you could
>probably check out the latest 70-MB incarnation of BASIC from Micro$oft..
>they're even making it network-aware a la Java. But of course, having
>drunk from the True Spring, no sane C programmer would recant.  :)

Seventy megabytes?!  For BASIC?!  That's a hell of a lot of space to waste
on a crappy language!  :)  No wonder I don't like Microsoft anymore - they
are deliberately making their software so huge that you have to buy a
whole new hard drive each time a new version comes out...

Consider that DJGPP is FREE, and a good working distribution is less than 20
MB...

John