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BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#51

Post by Jtsummers »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
rbanffy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Interpreted yes, unstructured no. Dartmouth BASIC was unstructured until 7th edition (1980). The home BASICs started coming out before then and could fairly claim their unstructured nature as a consequence of the contemporary, to them, Dartmouth BASIC.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#53

Post by skissane »

ajross wrote: post #45
skissane wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> FWIW those are all third generation "structured BASIC" languages, not what I understand the upthread commenter to be asking about.

They weren't. Many minicomputer BASICs of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Wang's, lacked those structured programming features you are talking about, at least originally. They were classic GOTO/GOSUB line number spaghetti code. And huge amounts of business software was written in them.

Some of those apps still run today, because the languages have been ported to Windows/Linux/etc. And eventually, just like Microsoft did, they added a lot of those structured programming features. But sometimes you'll find pre-structured spaghetti-style code surviving long after the dialect gained the ability to do better.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#54

Post by jhbadger »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
SoftTalker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which were created decades after the original versions and are only identifiable as "BASIC" in that they share a few keywords like PRINT and FOR...NEXT.

The later "structured BASIC" dialects resemble more COMAL than traditional BASIC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL

Re: BASIC turns 60

#55

Post by bitwize »

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 was one of the business software platforms for small businesses in the 1970s. MAI sold it as a turnkey solution including the computer which was a rebadged Microdata 1600. It was almost a BASIC machine the way Lisp machines were Lisp machines: all application level code, including that used for system maintenance, was written in BASIC.

The dialect was one of many called "Business BASIC", which basically extended normal BASIC with COBOL-like capabilities like better string handling, decimal math for currency handling, and ISAM-like file manipulation. It allowed for developing the same kinds of applications as COBOL while having a nicer development environment than COBOL.

The major accounting suites for small business of the 1970s, MAS 90 and MAS 200, were written in Basic Four BASIC. A lot of applications were. Other dialects, like Pick BASIC, supported business applications as well. All of these were much more fully featured than like Microsoft BASIC on Commodore/Apple/Tandy machines. Those were toys in comparison to minicomputer BASICs.

Basic Four itself shipped on some microcomputers like the Tandy 2000. Compatible environments came out for PC, including AB86 for DOS, Thoroughbred/OS, BASIS BBj, and ProvideX. Keeping those old systems running on newer hardware was an enticing business, just like for COBOL programs.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#56

Post by bdcravens »

My start to programming was accidentally signing up for a class in high school that taught Turbo Pascal (1995). I then starting playing on my TI-85 (TIBASIC) and then bought a friend's old 286 and started hacking around in QBASIC. That unlocked a memory from when I was elementary school in the early-mid eighties and we did some programming on an Apple (II I'm guessing), writing BASIC, early enough that line numbers were still required.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#58

Post by nxobject »

7thaccount wrote: post #23
georgeecollins wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VBA was used for tons of enterprise applications in the late '90s and early oughts. The implementation in things like Excel was surprisingly powerful and they had to sort of dial it back because they realized it was a huge security risk. (You could open up a spreadsheet that was a powerful virus.) In the '90s when we were developing a 3D game (in C++) I made an early iteration of the level designer in VBA on Excel. Y…

People still use VBA all the time. I think of it differently than the basic language of the 80s or even the more powerful commercial compilers used by some today like PowerBasic. VBA is just so highly tied to Excel. There is a new way to also script Excel with some kind of typescript. It's built into the latest version of Excel and seems to be more straightforward.

At this point, I think there are multiple sufficiently general-purpose languages bolted onto Excel if you have 365 (sadly enough, I work at a place with LTSC) - Power Query, the array language subset of Excel's formula language, Python, Office.js, VBA. But if you're collaborating with people I think you only predictably have VBA.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#59

Post by binary132 »

I’ve been trying to teach my (admittedly pretty young) kids Lua and I have to say BASIC is just a lot simpler to understand when you don’t know anything about anything.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#60

Post by duffyjp »

In elementary school my uncle gave me his old LASER 286S. It was too old for all the games my friends played so I mostly just farted around in QBasic all day.

I really wish I still had that system and all my BASIC scripts but those are long gone.

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