BASIC appreciation thread

hiss.. -explode-

The greatest day of my life was when I realized that somebody along the line was smart enough to realize how useless those line numbers were, and that by the time I discovered QBasic they were pointless.
0000
What would happen if you did this:

10 PRINT "10"
30 PRINT "30"
20 PRINT "20"

Syntax error, "10 20 30", or "10 30 20"?

*edit: To be clear, I was pretty proficient in BASIC before I discovered that line numbers were useless. Eventually, I stopped spacing them by ten, and started spacing them by 50, because 10 just wasn't cutting it. But I don't recall what out of order numbers did...[frown]

CM

ROFL

I was lucky and never got involved in this... 'BASIC' you call it? Phew. :-p

#include <stdio.h>int main(int nArgs, char **args){     for(;;)          printf("Basic Sucks! Long live C!\n");     return 0;}

:P

10 PRINT "Basic was the best"

Quote:

Original post by Conner McCloud What would happen if you did this: 10 PRINT "10" 30 PRINT "30" 20 PRINT "20" Syntax error, "10 20 30", or "10 30 20"? CM

(Edit: my answer is in TI-BASIC.) It would do nothing until you type "RUN", and then it will give "10 20 30" with carriage returns in between! :) Then, when you type "LIST", it would list the program in proper order.

GOSUB and don't RETURN

see signature.

BTW, I used to program in METAL BASIC on my old mac a long time ago, and THAT was GREAT! Thats the most fun I've ever had with BASIC (although I didn't get too far because I didn't have a clue what I was doing and eventually switched to pc anyway).

Quote:

Original post by Matthew Doucette Nothing until you type "RUN", and then it will give "10 20 30" with carriage returns inbetween! :)

That's what I figured, but don't recall if I'd ever tried it. Thanks.

CM

I really like TI-Basic (TI-89 Basic, specifically; it's much better than older versions). I never messed with "regular" (PC) basic, but TI-Basic works very well for math and very basic graphics things. I can fairly quickly throw a simple game together, and I can easily solve math problems that are far harder to represent in lower-level languages.

It doesn't have line numbers like many older BASIC variations, and the syntax is a bit more comprehensible to C programmers. Here's a quick sample: (-> is one character)

x+y*i(imag character)->zFor iter,1,100z^2+c->zIf abs(z)>2 ThenPtOn x,yExitEndIfEndFor

If you couldn't tell, that's the inner loop of a program to graph the mandelbrot set.

It's really simple and convenient to have a language right on the calculator.

10 CLS
20 INPUT "AM I ALWAYS RIGHT???"; a$
30 IF a$ = "Y" THEN
40 PRINT "BASIC IS THE ONLY WAY TO BREAK INTO PROGRAMMING!!!"
50 ELSE
60 GOTO 10
70 END IF

Im a little rusty been a while but that's about right[smile]

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Why is everything in BASIC in caps? It seems like a very angry language.";

Ah.. I grew up programming basic on my C64. Moved on to pacman, asteroids, and space invader clones in QBasic. Eventually got frustrated with the lack of graphic features (and the pain of reading that code) and moved on to something a bit more flexible. Those were the days...

I'm seem to remember case not mattering in Basic, so it isn't angry, just insensitive.

i actually still use it at school when i'm bored.. there used to be a general programming class offered, but it was cancel'd when the teacher who taught it moved. I freak other students out when I make it look like I am destroying the computer.. Random lines of color and internal speakers [smile]

10 CLS
20 COLOR 9: PRINT "OMFG BASIC"
30 CLS
40 COLOR 13: PRINT "OMFG BASIC"
50 CLS
60 COLOR 15: PRINT "OMFG BASIC"
70 CLS
80 COLOR 11: PRINT "OMFG BASIC"
90 CLS
100 COLOR 12: PRINT "OMFG BASIC"
110 CLS
120 COLOR 10: PRINT "OMFG BASIC"
130 GOTO 10

Microsoft BASIC was so iiii incredible slow. Drawing a line on the MSX screen- I could almost see the pixel buildup.
But- a game was easily made. With a framerate of 1.

Truly, I love BASIC and BASIC loves me. I think I stuck with BASIC for way too long... Back in early high-school, I used QBasic on our Pentium-90 to make an RTS with pathfinding, fifteen different units with animations (drawn one pixel at a time in my own world editor) plus buildings, AI that would build a base and attack (but definitely cheated in terms of knowing what you had), and huge maps with a campaign of some 10 levels. Quest-based levels, domination, whatever. I hit the upper limit of QBasic, actually. I got an EMS driver that I could use with QBasic to get my big maps in memory. And a sound-card library, BWSB I think it was called. Although I eventually dropped the sound in favor of bigger maps. The source was too big for QB4.5 to compile, so I wrote another program to parse my original source code, take out all comments and rename variables to minimal lengths, and remove all whitespace. Then QB4.5 just *barely* could compile it. Of course I never decided to figure out how modular coding worked back then. I wonder if I can dig that old dinosaur up here somewhere...

Oh, the glory days. BASIC's a thing of the past now, of course, except for boring work projects involving VB.NET (if you can call that BASIC).



~BenDilts( void );

QBASIC is cool, but I hate TI-Basic. It isn't that the language is bad, but the interpreter is WAY TOO SLOW. Somebody should make a compiler that runs on-calc (there are C compilers for it, but afaik none run on the calculator itself).