Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🌮 🚀 🌗Surprisingly good article in TIME about BASIC:
https://time.com/69316/basic/
#basic #retrocomputing
Look at these NERDS!
Via TIME, I learned of a Kemeny & Kurtz book, Back to BASIC: History, Corruption, And Future Of The Language (1985), which I've recovered:
https://archive.org/details/kemeny-john-g-kurtz-thomas-e-back-to-basic-history-corruption-and-future-of-the-language-1985
Wherein they complain at length about microcomputer & Tiny BASICs, how YOU FOOLS should've implemented MAT commands, functions, & a compiler in a 4K machine. They did it in a mere 32K & ~30 grad-student-years!
There are some useful bits among the diatribes, tho, I'm reading with an eye on my TinyBasicWeb spec.
#basic #retrocomputing
Kemeny, John G & Kurtz, Thomas E Back To BASIC History, Corruption, And Future Of The Language 1985 : John G. Kemeny & Thomas E. Kurtz : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Back to BASIC : the history, corruption, and future of the language John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. KurtzAddison-Wesley Publishing Company,Inc, 1985,...
Stewart Russell@mdhughes thanks!
If this doesn't have a lengthy section on how microcomputers messed up how FOR is supposed to work, I want my money back ... (checks book) Why yes, yes it does.
@scruss Having just implemented FOR in TinyBasicWeb, it's Extremely Hard to have correctness when we also have GOTO. Which is why for the first year TBW only had IF/GOTO. Doing even this much in a 4K or 8K BASIC was impossible. K&K are very academics shouting at practical roadwork.
@mdhughes the whole book is a rant that turns into an advert for their product.
I wish I could find the report from some people on the ANSI BASIC workgroup (zero members from micro manufacturers, though Apple's Jef Raskin may have been to one or two meetings) who complained how much K&K slowed proceedings down
Si Dawson
ltning