Re:Decimal BASIC:a tool for calculation and investigation
by lproven on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @12:04PM
(#37833927)
> You can come at that from a different perspective in an improved editor, like Emacs
1. I wouldn't put beginners in front of Emacs, no.
2. The BASIC user-interaction model can be implemented in 8kB of ROM, and was on most Commodore 8-bits, for instance, without any block-addressible direct storage. That's a big win, in my book.
> I wonder if this is simpler to you just because you imprinted on specific BASIC dialects as a child.
I genuinely don't think so, no. It genuinely seems like a simple, clean, logical division to me, and the way that C and C-derived languages let implementation details fall through for the user to have to face and deal with seems like a major failing to me.
You can come at that from a different perspective in an improved editor, like Emacs, with the interpreter running as a subprocess: Write whatever you want, then send a portion of it to the interpreter and see the results in another window or pane.
> In BASIC, if output is in quotes, the language prints it. Other stuff is outside the quotes. Dead easy, simple, memorable.
I wonder if this is simpler to you just because you imprinted on specific BASIC dialects as a child.