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

[bill]

On 1/11/2024 2:42 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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); 

Dave has his fixation on BASIC.  One of mine is COBOL.
When using it to do the kind of work is was designed and intended for
just what do you think is wrong with COBOL?

bill