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musicale

> It wasn't that easy to understand

Yes it was.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basicmanual_1964.pdf

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These vintage BASIC games' code looks clear as mud to me.

http://www.vintage-basic.net/bcg/superstartrek.bas

https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=1...

This is 1964’s BASIC, and it is quite basic (if you pardon the pun). It had no form of functions or procedures, not even the most elementary “GOTO and remember where you came from so you can return here later”. If you look at a more modern Basic implementation, they are more complex, and tend to have pointless complexities like differentiating Sub and Function procedures or two call syntaxes.

That's kind of the point. BASIC was conceived as a simplified FORTRAN that beginners could learn in an afternoon but which was capable enough to enable them to write useful programs.

1964 BASIC did support single-line function definitions (see page 13.)

Dartmouth BASIC kept evolving into the 1980s and seems to have turned into a pretty capable language that retained much of the accessibility of the original. I wonder what would have happened if True BASIC had been a free/open source project instead of proprietary software.

It was capable enough for writing very simple programs on one of the earliest time-sharing systems (DTSS). Not really what we'd consider "useful" today, though. To be fair, you hit the limits of usability pretty quickly on any 1960s language. Even text editing was comparatively kludgy back then, which is why BASIC used line numbers to ease line editing on teletype terminals. There was no point to a "free-form" language since everything was entered line-by-line to begin with.

> Not really what we'd consider "useful" today, though

Simple numerical/mathematical programs are certainly useful today, especially for students and researchers - BASIC emerged from Dartmouth's math department after all. Of course now we can run them on pocket calculators - some of which still run BASIC!

As I understand it, subsequent editions of BASIC running on Dartmouth's time-sharing system were used for a wide variety of applications, including:

- numerical programs (including scientific and engineering computation)

- simulations

- text formatting and document preparation

- statistics and data analysis

- communication programs such as online chat

- data storage and retrieval

- course management and grading

- games

- printing things from form letters to large signs

etc.

Regarding the limits of 1960s computing, it's worth noting that primitive computing systems, along with numerical and control software, were useful in helping to send humans to the moon and back (among other impressive accomplishments.)

> 1964 BASIC did support single-line function definitions (see page 13.)

Those are extremely basic functions that can only do a simple math operation on a single number. This is a function in the math sense, but not useful for programming.

I don't think we're in disagreement except on the point as to whether DEF FN was a useful feature or not. It's certainly useful for numerical code.

Personally I'm kind of impressed that it existed back then at all, as well as the simplicity of original BASIC that enabled regular people to write useful programs, nearly 60 years ago.

Yeah those goto's also caused what we called spaghetti code.

Lucky gosub came soon after which left a return pointer on the stack, making things a lot better and basically being like an early function call.

Only problem was you could still goto around making life really confusing for yourself :) A lot of bad habits were learned this way :P

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