[Info-vax] OOBASIC (was: Re: IBM Layoffs...)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-29 00:03:00 +0000, johnson.eric at gmail.com said:

> On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 6:17:56 PM UTC-5, David Froble wrote:
> 
>> Just teach VAX Basic, what else could ever be needed?  :-)
> 
> I know you probably mean this tongue in cheek, but I'll answer anyway.
> 
> Perhaps DEC Basic has constructs I wasn't aware of, but I suspect it
> would be a bit tough to cover programmatic idioms that center around
> things such as closures, lambdas, call with current continuation, generic
> programming, functional programming, object oriented programming,
> dynamic typing, meta programming, and of course garbage collection.

I was pondering OOBASIC would look like, just the other day.  Parts are 
certainly doable, at least for something akin to blocks and dispatch 
queues (closures), for objects and automatic reference counting (GC), 
and also dynamic typing.   Some form of interators and generics would 
likely fit, too.  Bringing back the interpreter and a JIT would be 
feasible, too.  Not really sure that FP would work or fit all that well 
within the existing BASIC language environment and expectations, though.

> To be fair, no language covers all of those topics completely. Many things
> are entwined, and there are of course tradeoffs between what a language
> chooses to emphasize and what it chooses to hide. But I'm just not sure
> I see a language like DEC Basic offering a unique voice on those topics.

OOBASIC would be much further past DEC BASIC than DEC BASIC was past 
BASIC-Plus 2.

Now the chances of OOBASIC having a market, or being worth the 
investment?  Probably zilch.



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