I'm really enjoying #FastBasic on #atari8bit! It feels much more modern* than other languages on the platform, and the native IDE booting from BW-DOS has just enough utility to make it viable to write code on an Atari 800 or equivalent. (I miss vi's 'join' and a search and replace utility, but the edit/save/run cycle feels very natural.)

FastBasic's author is active on #AtariAge, and has also contributed to the recent 1.5 release of BW-DOS, in conjunction with Jiří Bernášek, the original author of BW-DOS.

It's extraordinary; the #retrocomputing scene is more lively and robust than ever, between new hardware add-ons and new programming languages.

• Well, 1970s structured programming modern; in FastBasic, there's no scoping of variables, nor functions that return values, nor hand-holding error messages. Lots of great utility in the several looping constructs and 16-bit DPOKE and DPEEK, and the recent addition of #FujiNet commands is intriguing, on top of the existing #XIO support.

#structuredProgramming #BWDOS

The first non-BASIC programming language I learned was Karel the Robot. It’s a pseudo-Algol-derived teaching language. We had a Honeywell mainframe (this high school didn’t get their supercomputer until after I left for Japan) to build and run our programs.

Today I learned there’s a WebAssembly-based version and IDE that runs in the browser. Made me smile.

#karel #structuredprogramming
#webassembly

Karel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_(programming_language)

Project: https://github.com/giper45/KarelWebAssemblyIDE

Demo: https://karel-webassembly.netlify.app/

Nikolaus #Wirth considered harmful (for the "letters to the editor" sent-in by Edsger W. #dijkstra

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF

#GOTO #BASIC #StructuredProgramming

When #StructuredProgramming was a new thing, it was more often for people using it to make mistakes than writing programming with go to's. The structured version of the program from #TECO manual has a mistake that prevents it from work, can you spot it? (Answer in the reply)

#programming #challenge