Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 144 posts

Re: BASIC turns 60

#31

Post by krumpet »

TillE wrote: post #24
duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

Except for some graphics code, Ultima I was written in Applesoft BASIC. Akalabeth was entirely BASIC, but that's somewhat less impressive.

I still play Ultima IV at least a couple times a year. Never gets old.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#32

Post by mysterydip »

rbanffy wrote: post #4

It's hard to overstate how important BASIC was to the adoption of personal computing - it provided a straightforward way to program an entire generation of home computers and bootstrapped countless careers.

QBASIC and the printouts I could get of fanzines or Pete's QB Site kept me engaged in programming throughout middle school. I moved ok to VB 5/6 in high school and began my career making all kinds of small apps and utilities for people and companies.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#33

Post by quaffapint »

Let's see my BE language progression went from...

Apple Logo->Commodore BASIC->Fortran->Pascal->PHP->Java->VB6->.NET...and other modern things.

...With scripts of various types mixed in there. But BASIC is what got me hooked. Being able to write my own games on the Commodore 128 was fantastically addicting. Leaving demo store Commodore's flashing background colors with POKE 53281 and looping around felt like I was the king of the world.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#34

Post by bombcar »

duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

I seem to remember some pretty serious (as in actual paid) programs written in QuickBASIC - the compiled version of QBASIC.

Lots and lots of 'business middleware' was written in various forms of BASIC, the most famous being VBA, but also quite a bit in things like QuickBASIC in an older period.

https://qb64.com keeps the dream alive.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#35

Post by AlexeyBrin »

rbanffy wrote: post #10
pjmlp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which meant a quite good performance, in a memory managed language, and ability to do systems programming. There was nothing missing in VMS Basic, Turbo Basic, QuickBasic, DevPac BASIC, that would make me reach out to C.

On my Apple II's (with AppleSoft BASIC) I missed proper functions and the ability to use a stack. Recursion was next to impossible to express.

The BASIC version that run BBC Micro had proper functions and subroutines with local variables (I think it even had recursion, but I'm not 100% sure).

AFAIK, all Microsoft BASIC (of which AppleSoft BASIC was a descendent) versions did not have the above until QBasic.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#36

Post by jonplackett »

rbanffy wrote: post #4

It's hard to overstate how important BASIC was to the adoption of personal computing - it provided a straightforward way to program an entire generation of home computers and bootstrapped countless careers.

I don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch.

Visual coding is my nemesis. I just disagree with it in principle. It makes even the simplest things complicated and virtually impossible to debug.

BASIC was the first computer language I learned. It’s so basic I just taught it to myself from the help section when I was 12, without any exceptional ability on my part.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#37

Post by reaperducer »

chuckadams wrote: post #12
pjmlp wrote: post #3

Happy birthday BASIC! A short reminder that the original Dartmouth BASIC was actually JIT compiled, including while using the REPL. And most big iron OSes like VAX/VMS had proper compilers. It was due to the 8 bit home microcomputers that it got the fame of being interpreted, as naturally there is only so much that fits into 16 - 64 KB.

I've never heard of the original BASIC being compiled in any way, JIT or otherwise. Far as I know, the most it did was tokenize keywords into one or two bytes, something every other BASIC interpreter took up as a matter of course.

I've never heard of the original BASIC being compiled in any way, JIT or otherwise. Far as I know, the most it did was tokenize keywords into one or two bytes, something every other BASIC interpreter took up as a matter of course.

There were dozens and dozens of BASIC compilers available, for all kinds of platforms from Commodore 64's to mainframes.

Microsoft BASIC Compiler for IBM: https://archive.org/details/stx_Microsoft_BASIC_Compiler_Fun...

Convergent BASIC Compiler for the Burroughs B20: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_convergent0BASICCompil...

BASIC compiler for Burroughs mainframes: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_burroughsS00InternalMe...

Re: BASIC turns 60

#38

Post by Jtsummers »

chuckadams wrote: post #12
pjmlp wrote: post #3

Happy birthday BASIC! A short reminder that the original Dartmouth BASIC was actually JIT compiled, including while using the REPL. And most big iron OSes like VAX/VMS had proper compilers. It was due to the 8 bit home microcomputers that it got the fame of being interpreted, as naturally there is only so much that fits into 16 - 64 KB.

I've never heard of the original BASIC being compiled in any way, JIT or otherwise. Far as I know, the most it did was tokenize keywords into one or two bytes, something every other BASIC interpreter took up as a matter of course.

http://dtss.dartmouth.edu/scans/BASIC/BASIC%20Compiler.pdf

Dartmouth BASIC was compiled.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#39

Post by pjmlp »

chuckadams wrote: post #12
pjmlp wrote: post #3

Happy birthday BASIC! A short reminder that the original Dartmouth BASIC was actually JIT compiled, including while using the REPL. And most big iron OSes like VAX/VMS had proper compilers. It was due to the 8 bit home microcomputers that it got the fame of being interpreted, as naturally there is only so much that fits into 16 - 64 KB.

I've never heard of the original BASIC being compiled in any way, JIT or otherwise. Far as I know, the most it did was tokenize keywords into one or two bytes, something every other BASIC interpreter took up as a matter of course.

That was how 8 bit home computers worked.

Dartmouth BASIC always compiled the code before execution, just like Lisp.

> Several versions were produced at Dartmouth, implemented by undergraduate students and operating as a compile and go system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC

The historical video also mentions this at some point.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html

Re: BASIC turns 60

#40

Post by Locutus_ »

skissane wrote: post #19
ajross wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots and lots of BASIC was used in production for routine IT-ish tasks at the dawn of the personal computing era. It was the only meaningful way to implement custom tasks until the mid-80's when environments like Turbo Pascal showed up. For years and years technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's and then writing their own BASIC to glue together whatever automation they needed. Was much commerci…

> Was much commercial software written in BASIC? No, very little. There was a huge amount of commercial software written in BASIC dialects such as classic Visual Basic and ASP, Pick/BASIC, HP Business Basic, Wang 2200 Basic, DEC BASIC-PLUS, etc. Boring business software you would likely have never heard of but which was (and in some cases still is) essential to running all kinds of different businesses. I used to wor…

I was surprised to get an email today notifying me of the X86 release of the DEC BASIC PLUS compiler...
Post reply on HN