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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2024-01-10 20:17:03 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro said:

> 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.

There's sufficient BASIC code that's still in active use to keep VSI 
interested in providing at least some tooling for those OpenVMS 
customers.

A whole lot of that BASIC code came through from the PDP-11 era 
platforms and tools. It is entrenched.

Would I pick BASIC for wholly new app work? Probably not.

But there's a lot of BASIC code around that would otherwise need to be 
reworked or rewritten. Or ported to BASIC on some other platform.



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