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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 02:38 PM

  Need a really cool Basic interpreter

  Of course, if you are using Windows XP, you already have the .NET Framework library, which provides the engine to run VB.NET, C#, etc. You can compile programs in these languages without using a fancy IDE, but I don't think that's the point because you still have to compile it which takes away from the "read-eval-print" immediateness of an interpreter. What would help Basic is if there was a really cool interpreter environment for the language, such as those that exist for Lisp, Scheme, other functional languages and some scripting languages. The fun part of the old ROM Basic was being able to type in part of a program and run that part to see how it worked. Now we call that iterative design, but it's harder to do with a compiler.

  I also think that Basic does present some advantages over newer languages such as Python because the line-oriented flavor of the language does seem closer to the hardware. I think that is also one of the advantages of learning C, or C++ (without the objects). You get the feel that you're programming as close to machine language as you can get while still using a high-level language. Once you move up to python, ruby, and the other functional and/or scripting languages, you're moving even higher up in abstraction from the hardware.

  —Mike M. Read Mike M.'s other letters
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