Differences between version 26 and predecessor to the previous major change of BASIC.
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| Newer page: | version 26 | Last edited on Wednesday, May 4, 2005 6:59:43 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 24 | Last edited on Monday, May 2, 2005 8:38:32 am | by SamJansen | Revert |
@@ -16,9 +16,9 @@
''It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that ~[sic] have had prior exposure to [BASIC]; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.''
<br> – EdsgerWybeDijkstra
-The language is so pathetically limited that it needs to be heavily extended to be useful. Of course, every implementor chose their own ways to do so, so there are thousands of dialects of [BASIC]. Some have quite sophisticated extensions, and most of those still in use have been extended to strongly resemble [Pascal].
+The language is so pathetically limited that it needs to be heavily extended to be useful. Of course, every implementor chose their own ways to do so, so there are thousands of dialects of [BASIC]. Some have quite sophisticated extensions, and most of those still in use, such as the excellent [PowerBASIC | http://www.powerbasic.com/] compiler,
have been extended to strongly resemble [Pascal].
[BASIC] became very popular in the era of HomeComputer~s because a [BASIC] interpreter is simple and so could easily be fit on a tiny [ROM]. Lots of little kids learned to program in one of the thousands of flavours of [BASIC] this way, some never to recover.
BillGates (who for all we know is probably one of those never-recovered [BASIC] kids) started MicrosoftCorporation selling [BASIC] interpreters for various machines. Even the first [PC]s had it in [ROM], waiting to be activated by an __INT 18__ instruction. ''(I remember trying it in [DOS]'s debug program, and the machine would lock up saying “no BASIC ROM installed” or something. Sad…)'' Ever since, MicrosoftCorporation's strategic products have been accompanied by ever evolving, ever less [BASIC]-like dialects of the language. You have probably heard of VisualBasic, which is only the latest (series of) rendition(s).
@@ -28,7 +28,8 @@
There are some projects out there that implement modern [BASIC] interpreters and/or compilers in Linux. Examples of such are:
* [wxBasic|http://wxbasic.sourceforge.net/] - a [BASIC] interpreter that has bindings to [wxWidgets].
* [mbas|http://www.go-mono.com/mbas.html] - Visual [BASIC] in [Mono].
* [GLBCC|http://lbpp.sourceforge.net/] - GNU Liberty [BASIC] Compiler Collection.
+* [PowerBASIC is being ported to Linux | http://www.powerbasic.com/faq/faq02.html].
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CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryDeprecatedProgrammingLanguages
