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My own point of view, given its supposed background as an educational tool, is that this should have been on the device from Day One, and work should never had
by saw-lau 14y ago
My own point of view, given its supposed background as an educational tool, is that this should have been on the device from Day One, and work should never had been started on it supported Linux. The immediacy of an insta-booting machine with BASIC is one of the things that cemented my interest in computers and programming as a ten year old.
I may, of course, just be being nostalgic here...
- bdfh42 14y agoI know what you mean - for a programming learning device then a near instant boot into a programming language style run time (and wow Basic was great for that - I cut my teeth on a DEC PDP 11-70 running RSTSE and the terminal started with the Basic "Ready" prompt) is just about perfect. Coherent, succinct and ready to go. But there are other things to be learned as well - hence my interest at the OS level.
- wiradikusuma 14y agobut some other people are looking forward to use pi for more 'serious' applications. luckily a quick google revealed that risc os supports lua and python, although jvm would be nice.
- meaty 14y agoI'd argue, having used it extensively in the 80's and 90's, that the BASIC variant shipped with RISC OS it is very serious. It's a different league to your usual BASIC variants and scales up very well to large applications and even down to system programming. It's completely unique and people could learn a lot from how little time it takes to knock out something useful, fast and powerful in it.
- wiradikusuma 14y agobut it's missing "hip" language constructs like closure or functional approach, unless there's something like CoffeeScript for basic
- meaty 14y agoYes there's nothing hip about it at all. But for the best part of 30 years of BBC BASIC, I've not heard a single complaint about that fact.
- almalki 14y agoThe war
- almalki 14y agoThe war
- ColinWright 14y agoFWIW, we've developed and supplied safety-critical, soft-real-time applications in BBC BASIC. It was a genuinely serious language. I also developed symbolic execution and partial verification systems for it, and that helped confirm that our systems were appropriate for the context in which they were used.
- rjek 14y agoPlease tell me who you work for, so I know to avoid any of your products. Using BBC Basic like this terrifies me. If anything, because its total lack of type safety for anything but the simplest of values.
- ColinWright 14y agoOut of interest, let me ask: Do you believe it's impossible to write safety-critical software in C?
- meaty 14y agoAnecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety. I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms. Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints. Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do: REM win p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr% REM fail p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr% The earlier has no cast, the latter does. When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut: http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg
- saw-lau 14y agoWow! Thanks for the reminder about how great NTK was. :-)
- meaty 14y ago+1 for awesomeness :)