[Info-vax] BASIC (was Re: 64-bit)

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2024 23:28:29 +0000, Chris Townley wrote:

> On 10/01/2024 20:17, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 10 Jan 2024 13:07:04 -0500, mjos_examine wrote:
>> 
>>> ... I think BASIC did have a pretty good
>>> run in the 90's and early 2000's, particularly on the Windows desktop
>>> platform.
>> 
>> It had a role on 1980s micros, I’ll grant you that. The ability to
>> switch on and start typing code made for quite a productive
>> environment: type a statement with a line number to add it to your
>> in-memory program, or without to execute the line immediately.
>> 
>> Nowadays, Jupyter notebooks offer a more modern environment for such
>> incremental, even scratchpad-style programming. And Python is a more
>> modern language without the limitations of BASIC.
> 
> Have you ever used DEC/Compaq/HP basic?

I think so, yes. It very much tried to emulate the interactive BASIC-PLUS 
environment from RSTS/E, as I recall (right down to the “Ready” prompt).

> It is unlike the early home computer Basic. In its day it was a modern 
> highly structured language - which was of course compiled.

There is one BASIC that I have heard about, but never used, which sounded 
genuinely interesting, and that was GRASS (or ZGRASS, as the Z80 version 
was called). It had multithreading and no line numbers. Function bodies 
were held in string variables, and interpreted from there. And this was 
from 1978.

There are some documents about it at Bitsavers.

> I maintained and developed an ERP system consisting of well over a 
> million lines of code, which worked well to support our business

So you got it to work, back in the day. Nowadays, there are easier ways of 
achieving the same thing. For one thing, you would have many existing 
libraries to draw on, instead of having to write all that code yourself.