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BASIC turns 60

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#131

Post by chasil »

skissane wrote: post #129
chasil wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A free copy of DEC's original COBOL compiler for the VAX can be found in the VMS 1.0 image at this site: https://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html Modern GNU COBOL can be found at this site: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucobol/ A great deal of the COBOL that we use relies on OS2200 DMS, originally from Univac.

> A free copy of DEC's original COBOL compiler for the VAX can be found in the VMS 1.0 image at this site: Where? I don't see any VMS 1.0 image linked to on that page. Instead I see instructions to join the HP OpenVMS hobbyist program, which no longer exists, in order to install OpenVMS 7.3 on an emulated MicroVAX. There is no longer any hobbyist program offering legal access to VMS for VAX. HP's hobbyist program was…

Sorry, I posted the wrong link.

I have downloaded all of this and run it on a rhel9 clone.

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH

Re: BASIC turns 60

#132

Post by enormousness »

phone8675309 wrote: post #92
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.

When I was in high school (around 2000) they had three CS courses that kids could take - the first was in QBasic, the second was in Turbo Pascal, and the third was in C++ for the AP CS exam.

Ours also had Fox Pro, and we did all of them (one per year). They also had optional Novel, Linux, UNIX and Mac courses (with certifications). Late 90s - early 2000 were a hoot.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#133

Post by fsniper »

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?

Yes there were very serious software written in different Basic dialects.

One that I was interacted with was a CAD software written in QBasic. It was about civil engineering and static analysis tool for concrete buildings. You could export projects to dxf format so you could import into AutoCad to fix bugs and plot.

Funny how the name was MGCad and author insisted it stood for MegaCad. I suppose It was a nice coincidence that the Author's initials were MG :)

Re: BASIC turns 60

#134

Post by musicale »

Jtsummers wrote: post #38
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.

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

Which is in fact the original BASIC.

+1 for linking to a scan of the compiler source (and object!) code (note the 20 bit instruction words for the 1964 GE-235?)

Re: BASIC turns 60

#135

Post by musicale »

rbanffy wrote: post #5
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.

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.

BASIC was largely a simplified, interactive FORTRAN.

Fortran is still used today, as it has a large software base of computation kernels and also lends itself to efficient compilation.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#136

Post by musicale »

rbanffy wrote: post #111
pjmlp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/pu…

Original Dartmouth BASIC is a thing of beauty. Simple enough to learn in an afternoon, but powerful enough to do useful (and fun) things, from numerical computation to games.

And it wasn't just the BASIC language (and its compiler) that made it so effective, but the entire system: a remotely accessible, timeshared/multiuser, interactive environment.

The idea that every student (including humanities and social science majors) could learn how to program (and be given computer time) seems extraordinary and inspiring. The idea that computing could be useful and important outside of science/math/engineering departments was also visionary (probably going back to LISP - note John McCarthy organized the first AI workshop in 1956 at Dartmouth.)

Re: BASIC turns 60

#137

Post by pjmlp »

chuckadams wrote: post #114
pjmlp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently people can't read, as I explicitly mentioned 8 bit home computers were the ones responsible for people thinking BASIC was originally interpreted.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#138

Post by creativenolo »

jonplackett wrote: post #124
johannes1234321 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For kids who grew up with smartphones and other visual devices it's extremely hard to build something "sexy" in the first few weeks with basic. You need some visual thing for the appeal.

I think aiming for visual appeal is a dead end or at least a false dawn. Instead aiming for that Frankenstein moment of excitement ‘holy shit this thing is kinda alive!’ Is where you want to get to. I introduced a friend’s kid to basic the other day. She’s about 9 and was already getting the idea of an input, making some decisions and writing an output. Even with that just being text she was excited, and was already…

I failed my school computing class assignment in BASIC because instead of making the word game I spent all my time labouring away chasing the visual appeal of getting BASIC to draw a fancy intro screen.

I ended up working in computer graphics :-)

I agree with your sentiment re: scratch though. With scratch I struggle to pull kids away from the drawing and asset selection tools. I’d like scratch without this.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#139

Post by AlexeyBrin »

satori99 wrote: post #103
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.

Why not both? My Atari 800 came with a BASIC and a Logo cartridge. Logo was the thing that got my attention first because it could draw pictures on a TV screen right away, but writing BASIC programs and storing them on a cassette tape was the thing that got me hooked for life.

Most BASICs had some primitive form of Logo language "on board". You send DRAW commands in strings e.g. "r90 f100". Clearly not as nice as having Logo installed on your computer.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#140

Post by Gormo »

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

I recall using TrueBASIC on the Mac in the early '90s, and IIRC, it had already been around for a while. It was a nice, structured dialect that didn't rely on line numbers.
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