SEEK HELP.
HELP is not a correct argument to SEEK. You must not have a lot of BASIC experience.
Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#22One who has a true mastery of programming should be able to write any program in any language, or at least see how to do so, because one thinks in terms more abstract than language-specific constructs yet is able to map them to any language.
Relatedly, here's TLS 1.3 in VB6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882985
Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#23One who has a true mastery of programming should be able to write any program in any language, or at least see how to do so, because one thinks in terms more abstract than language-specific constructs yet is able to map them to any language. Relatedly, here's TLS 1.3 in VB6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882985
What's interesting about it precisely that despite the equivalence (Turing machines and all that) the difficulty to do one thing is a language versus another is what make it prohibitively hard.
If one is "just" translating something that is idiomatic to a language to something that is not in another, it might take 100x for lines for codes in a way that is terribly hard to understand.
Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger Dijkstra
even smart people say dumb things sometimes.
like "goto considered harmful" when all assembly language depends on it
Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#25This takes me back. When I was about 12 years old I used Tandy BASIC to build a rudimentary programming editor that had a Multiplan-like interface. It's all part of the fun and challenge of programming: how can you construct something interesting or useful under these constraints?
Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#26SEEK HELP.
?Illegal function call
OkRe: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#27One who has a true mastery of programming should be able to write any program in any language, or at least see how to do so, because one thinks in terms more abstract than language-specific constructs yet is able to map them to any language. Relatedly, here's TLS 1.3 in VB6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35882985
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Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger Dijkstra
even smart people say dumb things sometimes.
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Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#29Never occurred to me how much ms dos batch syntax must have been inspired by basic when I saw the comments (aka remarks) start with “rem”
Re: Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC
#30In BASIC ? Why? Why would you do that to yourself? Don't get me wrong, if he enjoys writing code in BASIC, I'm not going to tell him to stop having fun. It would be silly to tell some random stranger "You're having fun wrong !" (Even if I totally think he's having fun wrong. Grin ). If he's having fun with it, go for it. But man, I looked at the code and got flashbacks. The bad kind. BASIC was the first language I le…
I haven't written BASIC since I was a teenager! The more "modern" basics, without line numbers, were a definite improvement. I went from AppleSoft to AmigaBasic and QuickBasic.
I only use BASIC with line numbers, mostly GW-BASIC and pcbasic. Without numbers it just feels like Lua or python or any other scripting language, but worse? The line numbers BASICs come with their own almost-REPL (IDE?) that I find quite nice (or at least fun) to work in. Maybe mostly nostalgia, but it is the only reason for me to use BASIC at all. I have some basic-mode installed to edit BASIC code in emacs, but I only rarely edit the code outside of its natural built-in line-editor.