Date   : Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:34:32 +0100
From   : "W.Scholten" <whs@...>
Subject: Basic & BBC Basic

L.S.

I was being a bit unfriendly in my last posting, sorry about that (for 
the rest of the list readers other than Kris), and I might be wrong of 
course in my assertion that Basic is not acronym, but just make it 
clear, I've not seen any evidence to support the acronym case. 
Supposedly it comes from an unpublished paper by Kurtz, and for example 
wikipedia claims it's not a backronym, but I'll only buy it if I can 
read that paper somewhere and then there could still be questions 
depending on the paper (you know, like making the acronym likely in 
advance by using certain sentences in papers, you'd have to analyse a 
bit, possibly a few other papers. And yes, that sort of thing happens. 
And the 'Acronym as joke' also happens...).

And just for the record (which notably you *cannot* deduce from what I 
said in postings or on the web), I consider Basic:

  - A good prototyping language
  - Poor language for most other things.
  - BBC basic is better of course, but not structured enough.

About BBC basic, I always thought after using it in 1984, that although 
it was reasonably structured, they should just have gone completely 
structured. COMAL for example also changed a lot and was around since 
the early 70s, why not use a COMAL type language with keywords as in 
Basic, and call it BBC_Basic. Now, I find that when trying things in BBC 
basic I often feel it's not worth it because of the IF THEN ELSE 
limitations for example.

Regards,

Wouter
---
BBC micro | Calculators | Classic PC games: http://www.xs4all.nl/~swhs/whs/