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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/10/2024 9:28 PM, bill wrote:
> On 1/10/2024 7:02 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/10/2024 6:54 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Wed, 10 Jan 2024 23:28:29 +0000, Chris Townley wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>
>> The world has evolved.
> 
> Exactly.  BASIC also evolved, but better languages have passed it by.

You need to distinguish between VMS Basic and the broad family
of Basic.

VMS Basic a very nice language for writing business apps
back in the 1980's: all the control structures needed by
a procedural language, the needed types including decimal,
builtin support for index-sequential files, efficient code
etc..

That ERP system of over a million lines of code would
have been much larger if written in Cobol/Fortran/C.

In todays world VMS Basic are missing a lot: support
for object oriented programming, support for generic programming,
support for functional programming, libraries (database, ORM,
XML, JSON, HTTP etc.).

But that lack is not inherent for Basic. VB.NET got all that stuff.

In some cases the syntax is a little "obvious that this is a bolt-on
not something the language was born with", but it has it.

Arne