Xref: utzoo alt.religion.computers:2535 comp.windows.ms.programmer:3227 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!chx400!bernina!bernina!neeri From: neeri@iis.ethz.ch (Matthias Ulrich Neeracher) Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.windows.ms.programmer Subject: Re: ap, Windows BASIC Message-ID: Date: 21 Jun 91 12:09:27 GMT References: <1991Jun20.034205.2661@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> Sender: news@bernina.ethz.ch (USENET News System) Followup-To: alt.religion.computers Organization: Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH, Zurich Lines: 72 In-Reply-To: rogerhef@matt.ksu.ksu.edu's message of 20 Jun 91 03:42:05 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: etzj-gw In article <1991Jun20.034205.2661@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> rogerhef@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (Roger Heflin) writes: [I kept the crossposting to comp.windows.ms.programmer, but I don't read it, so I set the followup to alt.religion.computers] >You yell about BASIC being bad. Have you ever used Microsoft QuickBasic? This post wasn't addressed to me, but I'll anwer anyway. I have not used Microsoft Quickbasic. I have used BASIC on a Commodore 8032 and on an Epson HX 7 Years ago. I had to use GFA Basic on an Atari 1 year ago. I found that it is definitely, absolutely *impossible* to write a program that would run both on GFA and on the other two dialects: While the other dialects *required* line numbers, GFA *forbids* them. One big problem with BASIC is that there are so many of them. (BTW, has anyone here seen the 1978 ANSI BASIC standard ? I saw it mentioned in a book, but I don't think it was widely implemented. How would standard BASIC look like ? Are there efforts for a revised standard (BASIC 9X :-) underway ?) >It is structured and considerable easier to use than any other language. So, what other languages did you write a considerable amount of code (say more than 1000 lines) in ? I have used Pascal, Modula-2, Prolog, K&R C, ANSI C, and C++. All of them were considerably more comfortable to use, once you knew them. And I don't think Pascal is that much more difficult to learn than BASIC. Maybe we differ in our use of 'using' a programming language. I don't consider 50 line programs 'use'. When I did most of my BASIC programming, writing a 300 line program was extremely difficult, with only global variables available and only two characters of the name significant. Modern dialects seem to have improved, but I still see lots of disadvantages of BASIC and no advantages. >The language look pretty much like any other structured language, such as >C or Pascal, the only limitation that QB has is it does not have pointers, >otherwise it is at least as good as C or Pascal for good coding form. Does it have enumeration types ? Does it have record types ? (Is this the 'structures' mentioned below ?) Does it permit dynamic data structures ? (I know, it has no pointers, but Prolog, Scheme, or PostScript have no explicit pointers either and still permit this). Does it require variables to be declared before use ? (This is a major advantage for any non-toy program, at least in procedural programming languages). Is there a reasonable subset of the language that runs on most implementations ? Does it have conditional compilation directives (like #ifdef in C) ? >There >are even several application programs that were written in this BASIC. People are even writing application programs in COBOL or dBase III. >You are reading >too much into the word BASIC. You are taking what GWBASIC looks like and >most of the other old BASIC versions and assuming that all BASICS are the >same, they are not. I agree. I don't know what programming language Billy Gates will be pushing in 10 years, but it certainly will be called BASIC. Now, what is the advantage of that ? >I can write a bad program in it, but I can do that in any language. >I expect Microsoft is basing Visual Basic on this. Do I understand you correctly ? Microsoft thinks that if people are going to write bad programs, they might as well write them in Visual Basic ? (Sorry, couldn't resist :-) >Rogerhef@Matt.ksu.ksu.edu Roger Heflin > EECE Grad Student > (913) 532-5600 Matthias ----- Matthias Neeracher neeri@iis.ethz.ch "These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_