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

[Dan Cross]

In article <unpa1b$3316l$2 at dont-email.me>,
Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>On 1/10/2024 9:28 PM, bill wrote:
>> On 1/10/2024 7:02 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> The world has evolved.
>>
>> Exactly.  BASIC also evolved, but better languages have passed it by.
>
>I confess to curiosity.  In what ways has other languages passed by Basic?

Usually the answer to this is going to be some combination of
better abstraction facilities, better safety properties, more
capable and ergonomic libraries, etc.

VSI BASIC appears to have a few useful things like static type
definitions, functions, etc, and it frees the programmer from
_having_ to specify e.g. line numbers.  But it doesn't seem to
have a lot of support for other abstraction facilities like
modules, classes, or anything of that nature.  String handling
seems anemic.  There doesn't seem to be support for generalized
memory pointers, let along non-nullable references, so your
ability to create rich linked data structures seems limited.  I
don't see any support for higher-order functions, lambdas, or
closures; no currying of functions.  Statement modifiers seem
kind of neat, but I bet they can be easily misused.

All in all, it doesn't look like a terrible language (it's not
COBOL); it looks like an early-1980s-era language.  But nothing
about it jumps out at me as being spectacularly amazing, either.

I suppose I would turn the question around and ask what's about
BASIC makes it more suitable than other languages for particular
types of programs?

	- Dan C.