Warp wrote:
> clipka <nomail@nomail> wrote:
>> Not really the most modern of languages (unless you count VB/VBA, but as you say
>> yourself these are actually totally different beasts), and indeed one of the
>> most frowned-at languages (VB/VBA included in this case); I guess that's mostly
>> undeserved
> 
>   The original BASIC was such a simplistic scripting language compared to
> way more advanced programming languages of the same era (including such
> masterpieces as lisp, which was surprisingly advanced and high-level taking
> into account it was invented in 1958) that it was basically frowned upon by
> everybody from the beginning.
> 
>   The original BASIC didn't even have the concept of functions. It had a
> very primitive version of them, subroutines (which are like functions which
> don't take parameters nor return anything, and without any local scope).
> The only thing which differentiated a subroutine call from a goto is that
> the subroutine call pushed the caller's address onto a stack, so that a
> "return" statement could return there when the subroutine ends. But that's
> about it.
> 
>   More jarringly, every single variable was global. The concept of local
> variables was inexistent, obviously because of the lack of proper functions.
> 
>   Goto was an inherent part of the language, and used extensively. This,
> naturally, also caused criticism, as liberal use of gotos easily disrupts
> the logical flow of code and makes it harder to follow and understand, even
> if the obfuscation is not intentional.
> 
>   Even if we took goto as barely acceptable, its original implementation was
> very ascetic. AFAIK the original BASIC did not support named labels, but
> instead every line of code was numbered (by hand by the programmer), and
> gotos always jumped to a specified line number. AFAIK the numbering of each
> line was mandatory. Naturally this made it quite problematic to insert code
> between existing lines. While it was customary to number the lines in
> multiples of ten, this only gives the possibility of inserting 9 lines
> of code between any existing lines. If you run out of line numbers, you
> will have to start renumbering. And good luck trying not to break existing
> gotos if you start renumbering. (Some later BASIC text editors supported
> automatic renumbering, including all gotos, but naturally no such editors
> existed back then, when even having an interactive text editor in the first
> place was luxury.)
> 
>   Control structures were ascetic and limited, as well as the possibility
> of creating things like data containers.
> 
>   It's no serious programmer ever bothered with BASIC.



Clearly, I am no serious programmer. That charge, I accept gladly and 
rejoice in it!
Thanks for the history of BASIC, I didn't know anything about it. As I 
said elsewhere,
my first experience of it was Microsoft Basic and serious programming 
language or not,
it was *very* useful at work and at play! And by it, I learned that even 
I can program,
though perhaps some would hesitate to admit that. :)

David

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