In defense of BASIC

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

At Durham College in about 1970 I used a PDP-8S, which was a 12 bit
*serial* machine, so everything that went through the ALU went through one
bit at a time.

Amazingly, this thing supported 4 (four) teletypes, timesharing the DEC
version of BASIC, something called FOCAL. It was extremely slow when all
four terminals were in use, but it did  work.

It also had a hard disk drive, the diameter of which was measured in feet
and made a sound like a washing machine on the spin cycle. Capacity in
100's of kilobytes!

I also wrote in Commodore BASIC what is probably the world's slowest
multitasking operating system, to turn the lighting and sound audiovisual
system for the ROM Bat Cave. The context switch time was measured in
fractions of a second. It worked beautifully, but the ROM turned it off
because it made the exhibit 'too popular'.

Those BASIC dialects were useful and we had to work with them because they
were the only game in town at the time, but I'd never use them in
preference to a modern programming language.

Peter


> | From: Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
>
> |   The original mainframe-based BASICs, and MS's GWBASIC and QBASIC were
> | interpreted byte-code, and accordingly slow.
>
> Amazingly enough, the original BASIC (at Dartmouth College) was an
> incremental compiler.  Each line was separately compiled, as it was
> entered, to machine code!  I think that that is the reason for the odd
> (crude) variable naming rules -- all variables existed (26 x 11
> numeric variables were possible).
>
> PS: I played with a later version of that BASIC implementation in
> 1967.  Mind you, I had no idea about compilers until perhaps year
> later.  What I was impressed with was time sharing (using a Teletype
> terminal).  Previously, I had mostly done batch computing with
> turn-around measured in months.
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