Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

["Kevin Lawton" <kepla@btinternet.com>]

John Moore <butter_pat_head@jcom.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
| "Kevin Lawton" <kepla@btinternet.com> wrote in message
| news:bd2p93$f8r$5@titan.btinternet.com...
|| John Moore <butter_pat_head@jcom.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
||| "Kevin Lawton" <kepla@btinternet.com> wrote in message
||| news:bcr0jg$ep0$5@sparta.btinternet.com...
|||| Kelly Hall <hall@priest.com> wrote:
||||| "Matthew Russotto" <russotto@grace.speakeasy.net> wrote in message
||||| QECdnXzeWrOgUm2jXTWc-w@speakeasy.net">news:QECdnXzeWrOgUm2jXTWc-w@speakeasy.net...
|||
||| <big snip>
|||
|||| Basic, which was not created to be used seriously.
|||
||| Whats your reasoning for that?  Just out of curiosity....
||
| <not so big a snip>
|
|| I was suggesting that BASIC was not suitable for
|| creating serious applications in.
|
| OK, again, with no hint of sarcasm or hostility, what is your
| definition of a 'serious application' and seen somewhere else in this
| thread, 'complex data structure'.
|
| Please take note when I talk about BASIC I am not refering to standard
| BASIC, but to all the different dialects of BASIC, emphasising on the
| later ones, as unlike some other programming languages, BASIC has
| been evolving to try to keep up with modern computing needs ever
| since its creation.  Did the first ever BASIC have commands that
| allowed direct memory access?  I would be slighly suprised if they
| did.

Probably not, but peek and poke made early entry, as I recall, closely
follower by USR.
The fact that BASIC had many varied dialects and little standardisation did
not necessarily enhance the evolution of that language. Many other computer
programming languages have evolved over time and being standards-based has
given that evolution a structure and clear sense of direction and purpose.
It was often the practise to incorporate the year in which the standard was
ratified into the name of the langauge so we had Algol-66, Fortran-74 and
Cobol-85 for example. It seems to me to be quite silly that many different
machines, on the market at the same time, could all purport to be using the
same language - interpreted, so it was stored as text source code - but
could not easily exchange and run programs. One particularly positive aspect
of Java is that this has been achieved - the language, as it runs on a
virtual machine - is truely portable.
Kevin.