Android 16 was programmed in BASIC (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Android 16 was programmed in BASIC (2011)

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18 pointsredman2517 comments

I'd expect most people who have clicked this link to have done so because they thought it referred to the smartphone OS called Android. Clarification in the title would have been welcome.

Related: “Source Code in TV and Films” – https://moviecode.tumblr.com/

Haha, this is great.

anyways, there is not data to conclude that it IS BASIC. There are many structured languages that can use line numbers. Also the way to make comments in BASIC is with the command REM. The screenshot use the quote character (').

That's actually used in some variants as well. Notably VisualBasic and I'm sure I've seen it in some older flavors as well.

Yes, but visual basic doesn't use line numbers? but for sure. it is probably a shortcut.

Here's GWBASIC:

https://hwiegman.home.xs4all.nl/gw-man/REM.html

> Well, he must have used some low-level methods too to operate the hardware of #16. Thus the programming of #16 must also contain (lots of) assembly

I got into computers just as BASIC computers went obsolete so I could be wrong, but couldn't it just have been a heck of a lot of PEEK and POKE statements?

Yeah, depending on your hardware and language and language extensions it should be possible to drive a lot of hardware directly from a high level language. Memory mapped hardware would allow peek/poke drivers, but there's nothing preventing someone adding, say, a PORT_RAW_OUT command. And even in the worst case, maybe you use a little asm at the bottom of the stack but you only need a tiny bit in a wrapper function.

I quite like these little sideswipes on old technology in pop culture. Like the Futurama episode that reveals Bender is running on a 6502.

Peak click bait

and Ghost in the Shell re-affirms our long held suspicion that C will last long into the future[0]

[0]: https://github.com/nullgemm/ghck

Ghost in the Shell is set some time around 2030, it's not really that far in the future at this point. Unless there is a major catastrophe, computers will be running binaries compiled from C for centuries at least.

Eight years from now, so yes there will definitely be C code being written.

The hosts in Westworld was coded in JavaScript. No wonder it went bad...

In the original film the scrolling code was all DEC assembly language. I thought it was for PDP/8 but apparently it's for a PDP/10.

Dr Gero truly was a genius

Such a clickbait title.

I thought Android 16 = Android OS 16 :p

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