3 ms·
BASIC was a product of its time.
by jasfi 3y ago
BASIC was a product of its time.
- mhd 3y agoNobody is ever talking about the original Dartmouth BASIC, so we're really talking about a vast language family here. Arguably with more difference between different strands than e.g. within the BCPL family.
- vajrabum 3y agoDijkstra was in fact talking about something very close to the original Darmouth BASIC. In 1975 all the other BASICs, like for example the CDC one I used, looked pretty similar to the original. And the differences back then were much smaller than what you see today or even in the 80s.
- kragen 3y agoas the article points out, many contemporary and even earlier languages supported structured flow control, records, local variables, and subroutines with arguments. and of course lisp was basically javascript basic had the advantage of being implementable in 4 kilobytes of ram and being memory-safe
- zabzonk 3y ago> memory-safe you are forgetting peek and poke.
- kragen 3y agoi don't think the dartmouth system had those, and anyway it's not the same problem as risking a crash every time you index an array
- pjmlp 3y agoJust like unsafe code blocks in modern languages, quite easy to search for. Basic has proper strings, proper arrays, with bounds checking, and automatic memory management.
- drewcoo 3y ago> of course lisp was basically javascript Those used to be fighting words around here!
- kragen 3y agono, never; pg wrote https://paulgraham.com/diff.html https://paulgraham.com/diff.html before he set up this website