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BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#111

Post by rbanffy »

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.

If you look at the BASIC that's 60 now, you won't see a lot of the features that appeared later in SBASIC (in the late 70's) and on dialects from Dec, IBM, Nixdorf, and others. In 1964, it was a very simple language with the impressive feature - and this is the most important ergonomic aspect - of allowing interactive exploration.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na...

Re: BASIC turns 60

#113

Post by rbanffy »

duffyjp wrote: post #86
jonplackett wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're giving me ideas-- My oldest is nine and that's probably around the age when I first got my own computer (a 286) and dove into QBasic. There's no way he'd choose to spend time in BASIC unless it was his only option. I have an ancient Thinkpad gathering dust, maybe I'll install DOS 6.22 on that sucker and have it boot straight into QBasic from autoexec.bat. At bedtime we're a "you don't have to sleep, but you ha…

A C64 Maxi would be more welcome, at least for me.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#114

Post by chuckadams »

pjmlp wrote: post #39
chuckadams wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Having grown up in the 8-bit era with Apple IIs and C64s and various weird Z80 boxen, I can tell you for sure BASIC did not normally get compiled on those platforms. Tokenized, yes, but nothing more than that. Dartmouth had more to work with even in the 60's so it doesn't surprise me they wrote a static compiler for it, though it's still news to me.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#115

Post by lyk2005 »

emorning3 wrote: post #79
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?

In the late 1980's I rewrote a very large pension actuarial forecasting system, written in Fortran, to Basic. I'm very not sure, so I'm guessing that the system had several hundred thousand LOC. The idea was to stop spending a fortune on mainframe time and run pensions valuations on a microcomputer. The Fortran system, running on a mainframe, might take 60s to run a valuation. The same valuation would take a full day…

I am curious how do you write software that takes a day to run. Today I can write line by line, and because computers are so fast, even "long" tasks complete/crash fast enough for me to iterate. I assume you had test cases but I still want to know.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#116

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
Jtsummers wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ignoring mainframes during the 1970's, predating home micros. Why don't you actually read my comments fully?

[deleted]

Re: BASIC turns 60

#118

Post by timbit42 »

WillAdams wrote: post #71

An interesting aspect of this is why there wasn't a BASIC on the Mac early on (save for an text-based version offering from Microsoft which barely allowed writing to the screen): https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

Microsoft didn't understand GUIs yet. Amiga BASIC was also written by Microsoft and the GUI support is also limited. Apple didn't create a BASIC for the Mac because was into Pascal and had used it for the Lisa OS and apps. Much of the Lisa code was reused in the Mac OS.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#119

Post by RetroTechie »

100+ comments, and nobody mentioned type-ins:

Common in magazines, you'd have pages with listings that users could type in, save, and then run (in that order!).

Well... usually including some corrections. The usual typo's, but even listings as published contained errors sometimes.

BASIC was very suited for this as many keywords are plain English or -like.

It's only later this got replaced by cover tapes etc.

And in the NL, there was a thing called BASICODE:

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

Which was an attempt to make a standard dialect that different computers could interpret, and/or convert into their own machine's BASIC.

A late-night radio program (NOS Hobbyscoop) would often end its transmission with some minutes of tape-loading sounds. Users would record this on tape, run it through some conversion program, and RUN. So the same program as transmitted over the air, could then be run by C64, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Amstrad CPC users etc.

Iirc it wasn't that popular compared to other ways of obtaining software. But computer users @ the time were eager to do & try anything they could get their hands on. Today's internet info-overload didn't exist then.

And of course radio had a wide audience. Interesting programs could thus be distributed among many users quickly.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#120

Post by rootedbox »

pan69 wrote: post #107
rootedbox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Turing complete.. and my apple II library had all sorts of crazy apps written in basic. I remember taking them apart when I was like 10.. and being like who has the time to write all these lines! Which.. I still think is crazy considering no IDE and how you would just input them line by line... leaving space between lines just in case you needed to put a new line in later.

When using line numbers you wouldn't go from 1 to 2 to 3 etc, but from 10 to 20 to 30 so that you can always insert a line (e.g. 11) between 10 and 20. After a while when the numbering became to messy, you'd issue a RENUM command to renumber the entire program, e.g. RENUM 10 would make the first line 10, and then use increments of 10 for subsequent lines. At that point you start over by re-inserting new lines between…

the good old days
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