[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2019 09:03:55 UTC+1, Hans Vlems  wrote:
> Re the Dijkstra quote: please remember that the remark was made in the seventies, and BASIC at that time was a different beast than it is today. (Like most other languages).
> Hans

EVEN IN THE SEVENTIES, WHEN LOWERCASE DIDNT YET EXIST FOR MANY SYSTEMS, 
A SELECTION OF DIFFERENT FLAVOURS OF "BASIC" WERE ALREADY AVAILABLE,
WITH A SELECTION OF DIFFERENT FEATURES (AND PRICES).

APPLE, IIRC, ROUND ABOUT THAT TIME HAD A FLAVOUR OF BASIC WHERE 
VARIABLE NAMES WERE ONE LETTER, AND EARLIER LETTERS WERE FASTER (?). 

IS IT ANY WONDER "SOFTWARE ENGINEERING" PEOPLE WEREN'T KEEN?

Edusystem Basic [1], by contrast, around that time already had 
some rather neat festures, not particularly object oriented 
(who knew), not particularly widely available (typically the 
end user's data would be stored on someone else's computers and 
accessible only over someone else's connectivity and there might 
well be usage-based pricing and no accountability for downtime).

That said, if what people wanted was mathematical or numeric
data processing made easy, a suitable flavour of BASIC could be 
pretty decent (e.g. for matrix arithmetic and matrix IO).

References:
https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/739-kemeny-a-kurtz.html
(*the* original inspiration behind BASIC?)
See also e.g. 
PJ Brown, "Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters" 
(Wiley, no legit download available afaik, but it seems to be on Scribd)


Enjoy.

[1] or whatever the "teach yourself programming on a DECsystem 10/20"
was called in the 1970s.