30 years later, QBasic is still the best

Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by pvg on Sunday May 27, 2018 @01:55AM (#17165662)

You can't take the address of a A$, for instance, and do anything with it. And in your case 'A' is always in bytes unlike a C pointer which has arithmetic that depends on its type. PEEKs and POKEs are not pointers.

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Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by badsectoracula on Sunday May 27, 2018 @07:57AM (#17166538)

QBasic has VARADR (or VARADDR) that gives you the memory location for a variable. QuickBasic also has SADD which gives you the memory location for the first character of a string, although for some reason it isn't available in QBasic (but you can figure out from the string data anyway, VARADR(A$) points to a pair of length+data words).

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Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by pjmlp on Sunday May 27, 2018 @05:54AM (#17166252)

Real pointers, those used by Assembly are also untyped.

Other Basic dialects, including QBasic's big brother, had a Varadr function or similar, to take an address.

C is not the absolute truth in pointer manipulation across programming languages.

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Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by pvg on Sunday May 27, 2018 @10:54AM (#17167082)

Next you'll be telling me laser pointers have colours and there are several dog breeds named 'pointer'. Pointer dogs are furry.

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Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by pjmlp on Sunday May 27, 2018 @04:29PM (#17168952)

I don't need jokes about laser pointers to present languages, some of them much older than C, which have pointers with 1:1 features to C ones.

Of course, it kind of hurts the urban myth that C is a special snowflake among systems programming languages, having languages almost 10 years older with such features.

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Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by pvg on Sunday May 27, 2018 @05:06PM (#17169108)

The original comment was a comparison of pointers in C and PEEKs and POKEs in BASIC. So making up stuff about how assembly has 'pointers' or trying to start some argument about C with a statement nobody made is not really much more directly related to what we're discussing than a comment about the music of the Pointer Sisters.

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Re:30 years later, QBasic is still the best by pjmlp on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:17AM (#17171023)

So back to Basic then, this is Turbo Basic (1987)

    ' a = *addr
    a = PEEK (addr%)

    '  *addr = value
    POKE addr%, value

    'a = addr
    a = addr

    'addr++
    INCR addr%, 2

    'a = &variable
    DEF SEG = VARSEG(variable)
    a = VARPTR(varible)
    a = VARPTR$(varible)

Album, http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/Borland_Turbo_BASIC_Own...

Or to stay with QuickBasic dialects, Freebasic music tunes

https://www.freebasic.net/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=TblComparison...

Which also provides the SIZEOF chord, simplifying the increment operations of memory addresses.

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