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• Monday, September 18, 2006 06:50 AM

  Basic Lives - unfortunately

  Clearly, the lack of Basic hasn't stopped India and now China from churning out hundreds of thousands of new programmers every year. And actually wasn't Basic itself crap? - which is the reason one is always taught Pascal as a first-programming language in the universities (so much fewer bad habit to unlearn). Plus Visual Basic is probably an ideal starting point for many people.

  Then again, writing a Basic compiler/interpreter oneself should not be an insurmountable task. In the C world, there is Lexx (Lexical Analyser) and Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), which are a very nice pair of tools to enable you to write compilers for anything; and there is a Java equivalent JavaCC (Java Compiler-Compiler). So if you can't find a Basic interpreter - write your own.

  Plus one kind of suspects, that the author is falling victim to the trap of believing that everything was better in one's youth. Which at least in the field of computing, is demonstrably not true. One also suspects, that the author is unable or unwilling to give Visual Basic a try.

  However, I did start to get a bit nostalgic for those oh-so-much simpler days myself, and began to wonder whatever happened to Basic. Borland had a Turbo Basic, which was in fact pretty snazzy, but about this time they also came out with Turbo Pascal (now Delphi). So I personally lost interest in Turbo Basic, since Turbo Pascal was simply so much better. But what did happen to Turbo Basic?

  And guess what? A quick search in the Internet reveals:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_BASIC_programming_language

  Turbo BASIC is a BASIC compiler and dialect originally created by Robert 'Bob' Zale and bought from him by Borland. When Borland decided to stop publishing it, Zale bought it back from them, renamed it to PowerBASIC and set up PowerBASIC Inc. to continue support and development of it. It is still sold today.

  http://www.powerbasic.com/

  So the author has spent 3 years searching for something which can be downloaded in seconds - albeit at the cost of 200 dollars. Plus no-one would recommend either Basic or C++ (too many problems with pointers) as good languages for an introduction to programming. And his solution (to buy an equally outdated computer to run Basic) can only be described as quixotic.

  One hopes that in general the articles at Salon are somewhat better informed.

  —Tim Francis
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