[GTALUG] For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| On 2019-08-14 6:34 p.m., Chris F.A. Johnson via talk wrote:

| >    It was Northcastle Structured BASIC, and here is the article I wrote
| >    on it for the TPUG Magazine:
| >    https://archive.org/details/tpug-newsletter-23/page/n21

Chris J: Thanks for the pointer.  After I read your article, I looked at 
other parts of that issue.  There were some authors names that I 
remembered, even though I wasn't a Commodore guy: Avy Moise (he was also 
an Atari ST guy) and the famous Jim Butterfield.

| I've been spending more time with BASIC on Linux than I should recently.

Why?  Legacy code?

I cannot think of anything better done in BASIC rather than in Python
or Logo.  And that's just for things in BASIC's niche.

| Some of the actually useful BASIC interpreters include:

Nice list.

I have to admit that a good implementation of a bad language is often
more useful than a bad implementation of a good language.

PS: the most amazing thing about BASIC is that the first implemention
was an incremental compiler, not an interpreter.  One consequence was
there were very few legal variable names (26 * (1 + 10) = 286).

(Wikipedia says that the compiler was "load and go", but I think that
is wrong.)