[Coco] Hungry Basic09? (was: Weird errors...

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 15 September 2006 16:42, Roger Merchberger wrote:
>Rumor has it that Michael and Holli Ranck may have mentioned these words:
>>Except for the memory hungry nature of it (Which is typical of an
>>interpreted language anyway) I always liked Basic09.
>
>"Memory hungry" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Thats quite true.  All those dim statements that were dupped throughout a 
major program to connect the pieces together, actually represented only 
one copy in memory, so it was more frugal with memory usage than it gave 
at first glance.

>Sure, it's 40K, but compared to RSBasic's 24K-32K (depending on which DOS
>you had - and yes, you need to add DOS to compare apples to apples), I
>could make a lot smaller programs do more, more quickly, and more
>easily.... All in all, given 64K either way (as a process in OS-9 Level 2
>still had a max of 64K) I actually found Basic09 much *less*
> restrictive...

So did I.  I could say the same for its C too, but thats really an apples 
to oranges comparison.

>>   I'd have to agree though its too structured to be BASIC and too
>> strange to be anything else.

That structure was what made it efficient IMO.

>Define "strange?" It's just a Basic/Pascal mix... So what if it's not AKC
>registered??? ;-)

Chuckle.  Yeah, it was a bit of a mongrel, but it sure worked nice.

>>Leon Howell <puritan_2076 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> And an unnamed, no longer attributed "someone" wrote:
> >>
>> > Besides, BASIC-09's complexities are just the result of running under
>> > a real OS that provides real, complicated services to the user
>> > programs.
>>
>>Ok, first, no, "basic"-09 is not basic, it's Fortran.

I've looked at some fortran code (never wrote any though) and there was no 
way, without getting up close and personal with fortran, that I could ever 
have converted a fortran program to that dialect of basic.  I found it 
easier to convert a truebasic-5.22 eclipse prediction program to C at the 
time I did that conversion.  I could have used basic09 just as easily, but 
I needed the double-precision trig stuff that B09 didn't have.
 
>Having never written in Fortran, I had to look at the syntax, and there
>*are* similarities - but there are more than enough differences that I'd
>have to disagree. There are a *lot* more parallels between Basic09 and
>Pascal than Basic09 and Fortran, IMHO...

Parallels that exist more because it was much the same team of coders who 
wrote both languages.  I was never able to actualy do anything usefull in 
that dialect of pascal.  More or less std pascal as published in BYTE 
didn't have a close enough resemblance to this pascal that one could 
easily translate.  The translations required ran to as high as 8 or 10 
items per statement line, and thats not productive to calling it portable 
code, which is what pascal with its pcode engine was purported to be at 
the time.  I'd even go so far as to say that calling pascal code portable 
was an outright lie.  IMO, it was just another language-de-jour, best 
forgotten.  Its been said, by either Brian or Dennis, that since the 
invention of computers, we have had slightly more than one new language a 
week promoted by someone.  And most of them never had their 15 minutes 
without some company buying the time, and probably losing a shirt on it.

>However, if one were to say that early Basics might have been an attempt
> at "Fortran for Dummies" I don't think I could disagree... ;-)

I would, but not that vociferously.

>>You don't compile "basic"-09, you compact it or
>>something,
>
>The technical term is "pack." ;-)
>
>Laterz,
>Roger "Merch" Merchberger
>
>--
>Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
>sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
>zmerch at 30below.com          |

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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