Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 09:11:31 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: j DOT aldrich6 AT genie DOT com
cc: laurin AT cyberhighway DOT net, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: in Defense of BASIC
In-Reply-To: <199607040519.AA274157552@relay1.geis.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.960705090423.3009B-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Thu, 4 Jul 1996 j DOT aldrich6 AT genie DOT com wrote:

> 2)  Coming as you say you have from BASIC, you are at an even
> worse disadvantage because C is an extremely structured language.
> Creating even a simple program requires a lot of knowledge that
> seems very foreign to those who have worked with linear, interpreted
> languages.  And I wouldn't even _think_ of touching C++ until you are
> at least halfway competent in C.

That's not strictly true 
(leap to the defense of my once-favorite language :)

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  :)

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.

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.

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.

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.  :)


Cheers,

Orly