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I'm reading Anders E. Zonst's "Understanding the FFT" second edition, and the programs were originally in GW-BASIC. I have since installed qb64 and PCBASIC, an
by analognoise 7y ago
I'm reading Anders E. Zonst's "Understanding the FFT" second edition, and the programs were originally in GW-BASIC.
I have since installed qb64 and PCBASIC, and find the book really amazing; consequently I find the language superior for simple exposition - there's an insane amount of positive things you can say about taking a supposedly complex subject and breaking it down with a language that is that simple - if you truly understand a thing, you can implement it in a language as simple as BASIC in a clear way, taking the mystery out of it.
How hard can it be if it you can implement it on something with a Z80, right?
Brilliant, and odd timing that this is on HN right now.
- beetwenty 7y agoThere are a few rough edges in old BASICs(and they have been smoothed out in pretty much every one that's shipped since 1990 or so) but the practical truth is, to implement most code in a readable form, you don't need a great deal of expressiveness, syntactical sugar, or structured flow control, but you do need a few common data types and features to work with them, and even vintage BASIC does that much. This is what people mean when they say that languages haven't progressed that much. There are places where they have(e.g. dynamic memory allocation features really do matter to large-enough, featureful-enough programs) but almost all the features can be dispensed with for the base case of solving one problem well. The tooling and ecosystem matter a great deal more since they make the difference between having a finished solution in hand and having to fight to get something built and deployed. I/O and protocol compatibility are major sticking points everywhere.
- 0815test 7y agoWell, as some people say: you can write FORTRAN in any language! And BASIC is just substandard FORTRAN.