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BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#141

Post by rbanffy »

musicale wrote: post #135
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.

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.

It is relatively easy to port Fortran 77 code to BASIC. I did that in college to run “FORTRAN code” on my Casio BASIC “calculator”.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#142

Post by rbanffy »

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #139
satori99 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Apple II had single-pixel and line drawing with absolute coordinates. There was a clever “shapes tables” thing that was used to draw images on screen (I used it to draw text with nice looking proportional fonts)

Re: BASIC turns 60

#143

Post by musicale »

rbanffy wrote: post #141
musicale wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is relatively easy to port Fortran 77 code to BASIC. I did that in college to run “FORTRAN code” on my Casio BASIC “calculator”.

That's amazing. Of course the Casio might have been more powerful than the original machines that FORTRAN was designed to run on (IBM 704 etc.) Also: no punched cards.
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