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   Paolo Amoroso (amoroso@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:36:16 JST Paolo Amoroso

   Those who dismiss or deride BASIC don't go beyond the language. Guillaume Chereau points out there's more to BASIC as on early microcomputers it provided a full development environment too, almost an IDE.

   I'd say BASIC also supported a REPL-based, exploratory programming style similar to Lisp's.

   https://gcher.com/posts/2023-12-24-basic/

   #basic #retrocomputing

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     gnutelephony (gnutelephony@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:36:13 JST gnutelephony

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     • Space Hobo Actual

     @spacehobo @amoroso indeed tokenized basic interpreters, often using single byte tokens, carried a lot of code density, essential in 8 bit computing. Similar data structures often made it easy to write and call short blocks of native code directly out of it, too.

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     Space Hobo Actual (spacehobo@teh.entar.net)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:36:14 JST Space Hobo Actual

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     @amoroso And worse code density, for some use cases!

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     Space Hobo Actual (spacehobo@teh.entar.net)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:36:15 JST Space Hobo Actual

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     @amoroso And I think that derision of BASIC as a "toy" language by smug 6502 or z80 ASM programmers caused some smugness to rub off against REPLs as a concept for a decade or so.

     It's important to remember that BASIC was used in some heavy-duty production workloads! The lighting system for A Chorus Line in the mid-70s was all managed by a PDP-8 running BASIC, and it was at the time the most complex lighting plan of any stage show in history.

     https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1060.91

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     Paolo Amoroso (amoroso@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:36:15 JST Paolo Amoroso

     in reply to

     • Space Hobo Actual

     @spacehobo Ironically, Assembly has essentially the same control and data structures as BASIC.

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     gnutelephony (gnutelephony@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:43:21 JST gnutelephony

     in reply to

     • Space Hobo Actual

     @amoroso @spacehobo If you mean like Forth, no. But typically there was a single byte token, and the program was effectively executed by a token interpreter. If anything, it was more like a simple version of p-code. For example, "Print", "For", "Next", etc, would each be represented in single byte tokens.

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     Paolo Amoroso (amoroso@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:43:22 JST Paolo Amoroso

     in reply to

     • Space Hobo Actual
     • gnutelephony

     @gnutelephony Something like threaded interpreters?

     @spacehobo

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     gnutelephony (gnutelephony@floss.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Dec-2023 22:51:16 JST gnutelephony

     in reply to

     • Space Hobo Actual

     @amoroso @spacehobo there was also often an expression parser, which would parse the expressions part during execution just like other tokens, left-to-right, doing simple stack manipulations for ()'s, etc. This often meant it also did not handle true operator precedence correctly in expressions, but it was simple to write one, and fast to execute. You had to do a lot with so little space to work with...