The Sunday Poem: BASIC
Anyone who has programmed for a long time knows the weird feeling when a new language comes along and up-ends your assumptions. It’s certainly true that you basically learn to program once, and then learn many syntaxes. But it’s also true that programming languages bring along ways of thinking. So here’s a silly poem about that feeling.
BASIC
Who would think the line numbers would go astray?
Instead each order is atomic, each action is its own,
Standing individual like citizens, instead of operations.
And what is this inheritance? This oh oh pee? A gosub’s
Gone from subroutine to type! Variables once global
Now can var, can pointer, enum, local, scope!
Hell, there’s more than just one sort of number! A number is a number,
Dammit.
Well, hex and dec, sure. And binary, I guess.
But quit making simple complicated! Where’s the jump table,
Accumulators, and my register’s gone? Damn kids these days.
Haha. I put a function declaration in a header.
This is kinda neat.
8 Responses to “The Sunday Poem: BASIC”
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Yeah there is that feeling of “wow.. that was cool” when you find a limitation in your old language that isn’t in the new one. There is also frustration involved.. of course.
What language did you start in? I can’t find it anywhere on the site; I know you use blitz basic for prototyping but that’s about it.
I’m not one for basic though, I seem to unknowingly subscribe to the division between c++ based languages and basic based.. I love python though; As a result of this I tend to think of it as a c++ derived language, even though it isn’t.
I started with MS BASIC, way back when. Then Atari BASIC, where I also learned some 6502 assembler which I have forgotten just about all of. I picked up C because of mudding, and C++ a bit later because of UO. We used Python on a project at Origin, and I picked up Lua on my own when messing around with PSP homebrew.
What’s the best, C++ ? And why, (not knowing anything) is it because it’s got more functions or because it’s more reliable?
C++ is the best becaue that’s what most people in games use. But in the rest of the world, C++ is pretty much gone. Only the truly hardcore veterans of many a bug war insist on it, any more. The VBers won that crusade.
Inheritance is that thing where a baby mob gets its stats from a parent mob, right?
There is no “best.” when you are talking languages as a whole. There’s suitability to a purpose. Some are very specifically targeted, some are not. Some are fast and some are slow. Some run on a wide array of platforms, some don’t. Some run “close to the metal” so you can optimize more, some are “high level” and make it easy to do things.
Certainly one thing that most modern languages share (even modern BASICs) is that they are extensible from within themselves — meaning, the language is largely written in the language itself. This makes it easy to extend them.
Well, yes. But in code it can mean more than that. It can mean getting functionality, not just stats. Like Puzzle Quest could inherit Bejeweled — literally, the first line would be something that says “based on the Bejeweled code”. You’d need to have the Bejeweled code itself, of course.
It’s all good, as long as it can fly.
Do you have a favorite language, Raph? One that you enjoy writing with, more than the others?
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