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

[Scott Allen]

On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 11:56, Howard Gibson via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>    C++ is an object oriented language.  Arduino boards are used to
> execute simple procedures that don't require the effort of an object
> oriented language.

Arduino is an IDE and framework for development. One of the main
intents is to make it easy for "makers" and others who wish to quickly
create something to control hardware, and who may not be versed or
interested in becoming highly experienced programmers.

There are many boards, both official and third party, that are able to
work in the Arduino environment and thus have had boot loaders written
and libraries ported to allow them to do so. These range from being
quite low power ones, such as the popular 8 bit Arduino ATmega328P
based UNO, to some that are fairly powerful, such as the 32 bit
ATSAMD51J20 ARM Cortex-M4F based SparkFun SAMD51 Thing Plus.

Yes, C++ is the language used for Arduino but most documentation,
examples and tutorials for end users tend to use non-object oriented C
compatible programming style. That doesn't prevent the full use of all
the language features, for those who wish to. Many of the available
libraries are object oriented and/or take advantage of the additional
features of C++ over C. If you're careful to avoid certain aspects of
the language, such as those that make use of the heap, you can use
objects and other C++ capabilities to write Arduino programs that
compile to no more, or even less code than if written in true C, and
can be easier to maintain and understand.

-- 
Scott