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

[Chris Townley]

On 11/01/2024 21:13, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 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.
> 
Our million plus lines suite indeed did start on PDP, but was expanded 
very significantly under VMS.

I found loads of ghastly code used to do what was later in a single 
built in function...

-- 
Chris