5 ms·
I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father an
by susam 5mo ago
I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by their company, taught by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school.
After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in computer books, I read a good portion of it even though I had never touched dBASE in my life. I would daydream of all the little forms, queries, reports and labels I could make with dBASE. But I never got to touch dBASE in my life. We kids used to get LOGO lessons instead in school.
One day my father came back from his evening lesson mildly distressed about something he had learnt. He said they were being taught loops but in the loop there was an equation that seemed just plain wrong. It was:
i = i + 1
How could that be a valid equation? How could i ever equal i + 1? He mentioned that he had asked the teacher about it and from what I could gather, my teacher and my father were talking past each other. The teacher probably tried explaining that it was not an equation but an instruction instead, whereas my father continued to interpret i = i + 1 as an equation due to the algebra he was so familiar with. It sort of held up the class for a while.
The teacher asked my father's name, perhaps so that he could talk to him separately later. But when he learnt my father's name, he realised that his son, me, went to the same school where he taught. So he told my father, 'When you get back home, ask your son about i = i + 1. He will explain it to you better than I am able to.'
And indeed I was able to explain it to him pretty well. I was eight or nine years old back then. And that was probably the first thing I taught my father!
- hcs 5mo agoSome of my earliest programming exposure was a dBASE IV book my dad had for work, though it was some time before I put any of it into action. At that time I was reading manuals like fiction, only slowly realizing that I could actually use some of it with our computer.
- antonvs 5mo agoIt’s a pity your father’s perspective didn’t prevail. We’d all be using better programming languages now.
- pjc50 5mo agoIt's a notational issue. IIRC Pascal used := for assignment and = for equality testing. Where this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choice of = for assignment and == for equality testing won, but of course that's not a choice in a vacuum and it's tied up with a thousand other choices.
- gpderetta 5mo agoI think parent was alluding to mutability.
- pjc50 5mo agoWhile I'm a big fan of immutable design, it makes some algorithms much more expensive and ultimately DRAM is mutable. And the example we're talking about could be a loop counter!
- antonvs 5mo agoA tail-recursive loop handles loops just fine, and is just as efficient. This is a perfect example of the misconceptions that mutable-first programming languages have caused. > ultimately DRAM is mutable Ultimately the CPU executes machine code, but I don’t see you directly writing that. You’re cherry-picking to defend an indefensible position.
- kccqzy 5mo agoYes! In lazy but immutable languages like Haskell, it is totally fine to refer to the value itself during definition. This is really the same idea that a recursive function can refer to itself during definition. It’s common to define a variable for the infinite list of prime numbers, where the definition requires the list of prime numbers itself. primes = 2 : sieve primes [3..] sieve (p:ps) xs = let (h, t) = span (< p*p) xs in h ++ sieve ps (filter (\n -> rem n p > 0) t) Here `primes` is a variable that refers to itself in its definition (called corecursion), and `sieve` is a recursive function.
- hh2222 5mo agoPerhaps this is why BASIC originally used LET in the form LET X = X + 1, to imply a calculation rather than equality.
- cryo32 5mo agoThink that was just to make the parser understand it was an assignment without having to do any lookahead. There was also possibly ambiguous stuff with equality and assingment as they both used =.
- weinzierl 5mo agoThe = for assignment is FORTRAN’s fault. In the beginning there was no equality, just assignment, and FORTRAN (being just a FORmula TRANslator after all) made the somewhat dubious decision to use = for that (punch card space being sparse and symbols limited and all). When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instead of .EQ.. But it didn’t have to happen that way. ALGOL decided to stick close to mathematical tradition: = for equality := for assignment ("definition") While x := x + 1 is still not clean mathematical notation, I think it wouldn’t have riled up OP’s father as much. If he’d squinted enough, he might even have been able to see little indices below the x’s there.
- teddyh 5mo agoA rumor I heard was that x := 4 was chosen because it looks similar to x ⇐ 4
- badsectoracula 5mo agoWhy not <= then? I'd expect both < and = to be available.
- tandr 5mo agoProbably because '<=' is very easily read as "less or equal"? (unless you are joking, of course)
- piokoch 5mo agoThis tells a lot of about your dad - he must be an amazing person, so he was ready to learn something from his kid. Not everyone would be able to admit that 9 y.o. can teach him something :)
- kazinator 5mo agoI had the same problem. Sometime in 1982. at age 11, I started working through a BASIC book and an Apple II computer. I was perplexed: what is this? 10 X = X + 1 20 Y = Y - X If the computer is meant to solve two equations here, why not start with an example that has solutions??!