[Info-vax] The Future of Programming Languages and Web browsers

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 19, 9:52 am, "John Reagan" <johnrrea... at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >I am intrigued by your comment ending in "BASIC?  Really?!?!?"
> >Please explain this. I'm not looking to get into a "programming
> >language" war
> >of words because we all have our reasons for preferring "A" over "B",
> >but I would be interested in understanding your apparent disdain for
> >BASIC.
> >I can see from some of your previous postings on this forum that you
> >are a
> >very accomplished current or ex- DEC/COMPAQ/HP software engineer. For
> >that reason I would really be interested in your views.
>
> I've never been a BASIC fan.  Not enough typing for me, no pointers, not
> enough control over data structure layout, etc.  With all the better
> languages around, I just amazed folks are still trying to bolt stuff onto
> the side of BASIC.  Whatever floats your boat.
>
> John

More than 25 years ago, someone at my employer's company made a
decision that programs written by technical people would be written in
VAX-BASIC. I thought this was a big mistake and wanted to use COBOL or
Pascal. Since then, we've progressed to Alpha-BASIC and HP-C but I
still find myself working in an oppressive environment (but can't
complain too much because I'm still working)

Okay so I've had to roll my own CGI routines in order to allow Apache
to call my Alpha-BASIC programs directly. No big deal but a finished
callable library from HP might allow me to sleep a little deeper.

:-)

NSR