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BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#41

Post by seryoiupfurds »

Having QBASIC right there and available to play with was my introduction to programming as a curious 11 year old.

I remember reading every topic in the help browser over and over looking for how to write to the screen, because I didn't want my first program to waste paper with the PRINT statement.

One section of the manual told me to use labels instead of old fashioned line numbers, but I could never figure out the syntax to GOTO them. So I kept a nice index card with line number ranges for all the functions in my program. It worked great until I had to spend a day debugging a line number that ended with O instead of 0.

It was always a big mystery why renaming my program from .BAS to .EXE didn't let me click to run it like other programs.

Ah, memories...

Re: BASIC turns 60

#42

Post by bartread »

SoftTalker wrote: post #20
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.

Structured programming was not easy. You didn't have functions, you had GOSUB to a line number, which was just a slightly glorified GOTO. There was one global scope.

That depends a lot on the implementation. Global scope certainly wasn’t the only scope for all of them: dialects such as AMOS on the Amiga had procedure level scope as well. BBC BASIC definitely had DEF PROC but I can’t remember whether it supported different levels of scope.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#43

Post by pjmlp »

SoftTalker wrote: post #20
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.

Structured programming was not easy. You didn't have functions, you had GOSUB to a line number, which was just a slightly glorified GOTO. There was one global scope.

Yeah, if you ignore the BASIC dialects that actually provided such features.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#44

Post by satiated_grue »

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 was recently playing a commercial Atari game from 1981 called "Ricochet" that was written in BASIC, which came on a cassette.

Atari BASIC stored its programs in memory using a tokenized format - it did syntax checking when the line was typed in, and then the tokenized form was stored to save memory. There was a table of variable names, indexed by token. So a quick and easy obfuscation technique was to overwrite the variable names with something like just carriage returns, so that when you LISTed the program it had no variable names and lots of extra line breaks.

As I recall, at least. Haven't reinforced those memories in a while.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#45

Post by ajross »

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…

FWIW those are all third generation "structured BASIC" languages, not what I understand the upthread commenter to be asking about. Obviously you can evolve the syntax into a more popular language, and Microsoft did to great effect. But that's not the BASIC that was "taught in school in the 80's".

Re: BASIC turns 60

#46

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #29
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that was a 8 bit system, not what made BASIC in first place.

8-bit computers were pretty important for the widespread adoption of BASIC. For most of them, BASIC was the OS shell.

Moving goalposts, I explicitly mentioned that 8 bit home computers were the ones to blame for the fame of BASIC being interpreted, and unstructured.

Dialects like VMS Basic predate them.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#47

Post by pjmlp »

personalityson wrote: post #22
rbanffy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a language, it's very low-level. It has nicer syntax than assembly had, and is relatively portable, but the concepts are all really close to the metal.

VBA in Excel is only 4 times slower than C, I think (if you do typed code).

Also proper VB used the same backend as Visual C++ since version 5.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#48

Post by magoghm »

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?

MAI Basic Four Inc. was a relatively succesful computer manufacturer that sold business computers that used BASIC as the development language for business applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic/Four

Re: BASIC turns 60

#49

Post by wvenable »

BASIC is a uniquely useful language on machines with extremely limited RAM. It was designed to take up as little program space as possible even when compared with machine language. On home computers, each BASIC keyword is tokenized into a single byte.

I have a computer with only 3kb of RAM but has a comparatively large amount of ROM to support a complete BASIC. With BASIC you can create useful programs that would otherwise be impossible to fit into RAM. This has given me a newfound respect for the language.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#50

Post by mypalmike »

ajross wrote: post #7
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?

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…

Lots of commercial software was written mainly in BASIC. Plenty of games (a couple popular examples are Temple of Apshai and Questron, but there are certainly hundreds, particularly if you look at educational games of the 80s). And a lot of productivity stuff was written in BASIC, like database management (e.g. APX Data Management System - lots of the APX titles were written in BASIC), accounting (early versions of the very popular Peachtree accounting software), and even tax software (early versions of TaxCut).
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