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Another idea of BASIC is that the language should be similar to english. To this day, I am not sure it is a really good idea, because while it appears "easy" on

by blue1 3y ago

Another idea of BASIC is that the language should be similar to english. To this day, I am not sure it is a really good idea, because while it appears "easy" on the surface, you actually have to memorize the specific syntax of each command (e.g. FOR, or the punctuation in PRINT). Most other mainstream languages (C, javascript, java, rust, etc) seems to have settled on some semi-common syntax of the same ancestry so that it is "easy" to learn once you know another of the same kind. Lisp, on the other side... You have to learn a different paradigm initially, which some find hard and/or irritating, but then, everything is so wonderfully regular.

lproven 3y ago
> Another idea of BASIC is that the language should be similar to english. I am not so sure of that. BASIC has direct ancestry in Algol and Fortran, but it's also informed by COBOL, which appeared 5 years earlier. COBOL goes much further to be English-like, with its ADD foo TO bar GIVING baz ... syntax. It is my impression that BASIC's design intentionally avoided that, going for something a bit more terse and efficient yet still readable. > Most other mainstream languages... I think that's an artefact of commercial success. Pascal and the whole large, wide-ranging Pascal family, from Euclid to Ada, doesn't. Forth and Postscript and HP calculators and the world of RPN don't. Mathematica and things don't. Classic MacOS had AppleScript which doesn't, and that persists in OS X. APL didn't. Windows straddles a line with both C ancestry but also BASIC, VB, VBA, VB.NET, PowerShell and a bunch of other stuff that's not very C-like at all. And, as you say, Lisp is a whole other world unto itself. There's prefix notation with a family of languages, postfix notation which is another family, and infix, which is a huge family of which the curly-braces language are a subset but by far not the only subset. It looks like that from one position, embedded in the xNix world, but it's not a valid generalisation, no.

by blue1 3y ago

lproven 3y ago

> Another idea of BASIC is that the language should be similar to english. I am not so sure of that. BASIC has direct ancestry in Algol and Fortran, but it's also informed by COBOL, which appeared 5 years earlier. COBOL goes much further to be English-like, with its ADD foo TO bar GIVING baz ... syntax. It is my impression that BASIC's design intentionally avoided that, going for something a bit more terse and efficient yet still readable. > Most other mainstream languages... I think that's an artefact of commercial success. Pascal and the whole large, wide-ranging Pascal family, from Euclid to Ada, doesn't. Forth and Postscript and HP calculators and the world of RPN don't. Mathematica and things don't. Classic MacOS had AppleScript which doesn't, and that persists in OS X. APL didn't. Windows straddles a line with both C ancestry but also BASIC, VB, VBA, VB.NET, PowerShell and a bunch of other stuff that's not very C-like at all. And, as you say, Lisp is a whole other world unto itself. There's prefix notation with a family of languages, postfix notation which is another family, and infix, which is a huge family of which the curly-braces language are a subset but by far not the only subset. It looks like that from one position, embedded in the xNix world, but it's not a valid generalisation, no.