Re: Languages

[dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff)]

Bruce Randall Baker (av428@freenet.buffalo.edu) wrote:

: When I was in school we were told BASIC was developed solely to 
: teahc programming.  It was never supposed to be a "real" language.
: After we learned BASIC we graduated to a REAL language - Fortran.
: Funny how things go, Fortran is almost dead, BASIC lives on in lots
: of incarnations.

When I was in school, I was taught that BASIC was an acronym for
Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instructional Code.  I began programming
in it, and found it to be quite powerful, if occasionally a bit slow.  I
tried Pascal a couple of times and found that it was absolutely too
cantankerous for me...I can't imagine getting a routine TOTALLY finished
before even trying it out, or setting up all kinds of dummy procedures to
keep the compiler from crashing.  Come to think of it, I hate waiting for
the compiler just to try out a patch.  I went back to BASIC.  Then I tried
the other Apple ][ language I had access to...6502.  Okay, it's fast. 
It's also tedious, but it's kinda fun.  So on the Apple, I'm bi-lingual
(Applesoft and 6502), and I really don't consider myself a beginner.  Oh,
and I did get an Applesoft compiler, but I don't use it until the code is
FINISHED and WORKS.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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