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hoistbypetard

When I typed

'10 ? "hello, world"'

it got angry. That violates all my expectations of a BASIC :)

Also, is there a good reason the REPL won't let me select, copy and paste text?

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I spent 20+ years in my day job programming in BASIC on OpenVMS without using line numbers or GOTO's. Yet the first thing I did here was fall back to my childhood Sinclair/BBC BASIC of trying 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10

Can you talk about what you worked on in BASIC on VMS?

Software for the Agribusiness sector - mostly around the manufacture and selling of animal feed. So data entry, processing, interfacing, reporting. We had the legacy system which was a text terminal interface, as well as a newer browser based system that interfaced via webservices to the OpenVMS BASIC code. After 40 years it went end of life at the end of last year.

Wow, thank you for sharing!

I'm not surprised that the system lasted that long! VMS is legendary.

I've looked through the documentation for OpenVMS BASIC and it does seem like it was a nice platform.

The entire VMS system appears to be quite a comfy environment to have worked in. (DCL, help system, documentation, standard libraries, multiple languages (Pascal, C, BASIC))

It was quite advanced BASIC, so I imagine any kind of business application.

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na...

Hey pjmlp!

Yes indeed. The docs for VMS are great. Really cool environment.

On an unrelated note, have you seen this video yet?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701231

Very G-rated. It was always

10 PRINT "BOOBS" 20 GOTO 10

in all the department stores where I grew up...

The console is hand-crafted and implemented as an HTML or SDL canvas to support rendering text and graphics at the same time. I haven't implemented text selection nor copy/paste on top of that yet (and it isn't in my list of priorities right now because, well, you didn't have a mouse in the old BASIC interpreters anyway ;) ).

But at least Locomotive Basic (TM) of mid-eighties Amstrad computers had copy&paste, there using an odd 'shadow' cursor.

Oh really? That must have been too advanced for when I played with it back in the day :) I'm looking at the CPC6128 manual right now and cannot find "shadow" in it though; what are the right keywords to find this?

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/851404/Amstrad-Cpc-6128.ht... ?

The BBC Micro had a very similar mechanism.

But you did have light pens, and functions like PEN() and the ON PEN statement to work with them. When PCs came around, those were generally appropriated to work with mice.

You could do Ctrl+[arrow]-style selection/copying for now; should be much easier than mouse integration

Yeah, there are no line numbers (although 0.3 had them!) nor GOTO. I think this is the main thing I'll add in the upcoming 0.10 because it's what everyone asks for :)

https://www.endbasic.dev/docs.html#lang-goto

I imagine it would be pretty interesting to graph the data on how many people tried what incantations first

10 print "hello"

has GOT to be the leader.

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