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Yeah, and to be fair, the reason people think of BASIC as an "interpreted language" is that it's been a victim of its own success. Of course, there's no such t

Yeah, and to be fair, the reason people think of BASIC as an "interpreted language" is that it's been a victim of its own success. Of course, there's no such thing as an interpreted language, because it's implementations that are compiled or interpreted rather than languages themselves, but the fact that in the 80s, almost every popular home computer would boot to a BASIC interpreter prompt (Macintosh being the primary exception) is what created that idea in peoples' minds. The unfortunate thing about BASIC is that although there are many and various implementations running on every common computer system and OS, there's almost no portability between implementations. And, in order to do anything beyond a simple, text-based interface, you're going to end up way in the weeds of implementation-specific functionality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

lproven 4y ago
The fragmentation of BASIC was a huge problem. Also, that one of the most widespread, CBM BASIC 4 on the C64, was utter junk and made an entire generation of home computer owners believe that BASIC was junk, period. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html Contemporaneous with the C64 were some excellent 8-bit BASICs, notably BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro, but also Beta BASIC on the ZX Spectrum (a 3rd party add-on) and SAM BASIC on the SAM Coupé (an enhanced Spectrum compatible.) But not, by and large, on any American home computers, and so the large majority of people who mostly only saw, used and knew American home computers didn't know and were misled into believing that BASIC was rubbish. And so we all got C instead. And that really is rubbish. A quick and dirty hack from the 1970s that has created a multi-billion-dollar industry in fixing leaky broken software.

lproven 4y ago

The fragmentation of BASIC was a huge problem. Also, that one of the most widespread, CBM BASIC 4 on the C64, was utter junk and made an entire generation of home computer owners believe that BASIC was junk, period. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/71381.html Contemporaneous with the C64 were some excellent 8-bit BASICs, notably BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro, but also Beta BASIC on the ZX Spectrum (a 3rd party add-on) and SAM BASIC on the SAM Coupé (an enhanced Spectrum compatible.) But not, by and large, on any American home computers, and so the large majority of people who mostly only saw, used and knew American home computers didn't know and were misled into believing that BASIC was rubbish. And so we all got C instead. And that really is rubbish. A quick and dirty hack from the 1970s that has created a multi-billion-dollar industry in fixing leaky broken software.