Subject:
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Re: BASIC like programming alternatives?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Thu, 24 Dec 1998 00:35:20 GMT
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Original-From:
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stephen p spackman <stephen@acm.org^nomorespam^>
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Viewed:
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1887 times
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Ian Hall-Beyer wrote:
> Unfortunately, to write sophisticated programs, you need a sophisticated
> language. which tosses anything even remotely BASIC-like (and most
> interpreted languages) right out the window.
I'm not sure what this crack is about - the classical "interpreted" - ie
hard to compile - languages (LISP, SETL, APL, SNOBOL, Icon, Smalltalk,
Prolog, etc) have been anything but unsophisticated. In general, the
more sophisticated the language, the more effort it has taken to get
first class compilers, and the more it has been perceived as
"interpreted".
The reason BASIC is braindead is that it's a member of the FORTRAN
family, which is a difficult handicap to overcome.
The reason C is tolerable is that it's (arguably) the idiot child of
Algol - and even a very bad compiler can produce reasonably efficient
output.
And note, by the way, that BASIC is very *easy* to compile - but it's
not worth the effort!
> C is not that hard to learn if you've ever used any kind of structured
> language before.
It's just not very *safe*.
stephen
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: BASIC like programming alternatives?
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| (...) Unfortunately, to write sophisticated programs, you need a sophisticated language. which tosses anything even remotely BASIC-like (and most interpreted languages) right out the window. C is not that hard to learn if you've ever used any kind (...) (26 years ago, 23-Dec-98, to lugnet.robotics)
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