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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

As a language, it's very low-level. It has nicer syntax than assembly had, and is relatively portable, but the concepts are all really close to the metal.

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Which meant a quite good performance, in a memory managed language, and ability to do systems programming.

There was nothing missing in VMS Basic, Turbo Basic, QuickBasic, DevPac BASIC, that would make me reach out to C.

On my Apple II's (with AppleSoft BASIC) I missed proper functions and the ability to use a stack. Recursion was next to impossible to express.

Yeah, but that was a 8 bit system, not what made BASIC in first place.

8-bit computers were pretty important for the widespread adoption of BASIC. For most of them, BASIC was the OS shell.

Moving goalposts, I explicitly mentioned that 8 bit home computers were the ones to blame for the fame of BASIC being interpreted, and unstructured.

Dialects like VMS Basic predate them.

> I explicitly mentioned that 8 bit home computers were the ones to blame for the fame of BASIC being interpreted, and unstructured.

Interpreted yes, unstructured no. Dartmouth BASIC was unstructured until 7th edition (1980). The home BASICs started coming out before then and could fairly claim their unstructured nature as a consequence of the contemporary, to them, Dartmouth BASIC.

Ignoring mainframes during the 1970's, predating home micros.

Why don't you actually read my comments fully?

If you look at the BASIC that's 60 now, you won't see a lot of the features that appeared later in SBASIC (in the late 70's) and on dialects from Dec, IBM, Nixdorf, and others. In 1964, it was a very simple language with the impressive feature - and this is the most important ergonomic aspect - of allowing interactive exploration.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf

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

Original Dartmouth BASIC is a thing of beauty. Simple enough to learn in an afternoon, but powerful enough to do useful (and fun) things, from numerical computation to games.

And it wasn't just the BASIC language (and its compiler) that made it so effective, but the entire system: a remotely accessible, timeshared/multiuser, interactive environment.

The idea that every student (including humanities and social science majors) could learn how to program (and be given computer time) seems extraordinary and inspiring. The idea that computing could be useful and important outside of science/math/engineering departments was also visionary (probably going back to LISP - note John McCarthy organized the first AI workshop in 1956 at Dartmouth.)

The BASIC version that run BBC Micro had proper functions and subroutines with local variables (I think it even had recursion, but I'm not 100% sure).

AFAIK, all Microsoft BASIC (of which AppleSoft BASIC was a descendent) versions did not have the above until QBasic.

It did have recursion.

    >LIST
       10PRINT FNFACT(6)  
       20END
       30DEFFNFACT(N) 
       40IF N=1 THEN =1 ELSE =N*FNFACT(N-1)  

    >RUN
           720

Thanks for letting me know, BBC BASIC was indeed advanced for the period.

Structured programming was not easy.

You didn't have functions, you had GOSUB to a line number, which was just a slightly glorified GOTO. There was one global scope.

That depends a lot on the implementation. Global scope certainly wasn’t the only scope for all of them: dialects such as AMOS on the Amiga had procedure level scope as well. BBC BASIC definitely had DEF PROC but I can’t remember whether it supported different levels of scope.

Yeah, if you ignore the BASIC dialects that actually provided such features.

Which were created decades after the original versions and are only identifiable as "BASIC" in that they share a few keywords like PRINT and FOR...NEXT.

The later "structured BASIC" dialects resemble more COMAL than traditional BASIC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL

Again, ignoring mainframes during the 1970's.

BASIC was largely a simplified, interactive FORTRAN.

Fortran is still used today, as it has a large software base of computation kernels and also lends itself to efficient compilation.

It is relatively easy to port Fortran 77 code to BASIC. I did that in college to run “FORTRAN code” on my Casio BASIC “calculator”.

That's amazing. Of course the Casio might have been more powerful than the original machines that FORTRAN was designed to run on (IBM 704 etc.) Also: no punched cards.

VBA in Excel is only 4 times slower than C, I think (if you do typed code).

Also proper VB used the same backend as Visual C++ since version 5.

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