Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/07/04/23:52:41
Reply to message 2919860 from ORLY AT GIBSON DOT E on 07/04/96 9:11PM
>That's not strictly true
>(leap to the defense of my once-favorite language :)
Hey, mine too - I just hate it now. :)
>Perhaps you're under the impression that all BASIC programmers are
>high-school, no, primary-school nerds with GOTO's sticking out of their
>pocket protectors :)
Not at all! But considering that Lauren stated that the last time she used
BASIC was 10 years ago, I felt justified in making that assumption. :)
>I happen to have used BASIC a lot, and for *some* things it's better than
>C (heresy, I hear the cries!) such as simple string manipulation. I won't
>argue with you over the efficiency of these -- go talk to the Perl
>hackers.
I honestly haven't used a super-modern version of BASIC. I know that
when I moved from BASIC to Pascal, I wept over the loss of my awesome
string manipulating power. But then I found C, and discovered that I
no longer lamented.
>Anyway, I don't use BASIC right now, but as far back as 1987, QuickBASIC
>4.0 from Micro$oft had structures, functions, procedures, the rest of that
>stuff. In fact, I only gave up on it because I discovered that (a) Turbo C
>was three times as fast; (b) having no pointers was a major headache.
I am well aware of that. However, it seems to me that using anything
more complicated than a gosub is majorly stretching the intended
fabric of the BASIC language.
>Actually, my own language progression was BASIC-->QuickBASIC-->Pascal-->C
>The "modern" structured BASIC's (and some of the ones for workstations,
>like HP Basic, are really cool and have matrix operators and stuff) are
>really very close to Pascal in syntax and are just as strongly-typed. Even
>Visual Basic now requires you to declare all variables. And the crappy '$'
>for strings is no longer necessary or required.
Dunno - the last BASIC I used was QuickBASIC. I went straight from Atari
BASIC to Pascal in high school, played with QuickBASIC for a little while,
then moved straight into C when I got to college. :)
>So, if you're a Pascal person and you want to have an easy life, you could
>probably check out the latest 70-MB incarnation of BASIC from Micro$oft..
>they're even making it network-aware a la Java. But of course, having
>drunk from the True Spring, no sane C programmer would recant. :)
Seventy megabytes?! For BASIC?! That's a hell of a lot of space to waste
on a crappy language! :) No wonder I don't like Microsoft anymore - they
are deliberately making their software so huge that you have to buy a
whole new hard drive each time a new version comes out...
Consider that DJGPP is FREE, and a good working distribution is less than 20
MB...
John
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