Basic Nostalgia (1 Viewer)

[Steve R.]

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Microsoft's attention has moved on, but flame still alive

www.theregister.com

Seems that Basic has had quite an evolutionary experience. I haven't used Basic in years. Never got into VB. Still have the Mbasic and Qbasic guides now serving as dust collectors. Hate tossing something you might need once again. I have been hearing, in the background, of FreeBasic as an effort to keep Basic relevant.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Ah, my old friend BASIC - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. First encountered back in either 1969 or 1970 at LSUNO when they got a DECsystem 10 (KA-10 processor). I'm not claiming that to have been the first version of BASIC, just the first one I encountered. The first BASIC was built in 1963 by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth.

My most recent non-VBA case was DEC Basic for the OpenVMS/Itanium system up to 2016 at the New Orleans Navy site, because their compiled BASIC was able to connect via a 3rd party interfacing and app development package called SmartStar. Damned good language, very efficient, and able to use some bangin' math due to having both the tradition 32-bit/64-bit floating and the IEEE hardware math that had 64-bit and 128-bit options. When you are dealing with 128-bit math, you don't have a lot of round-off errors. (OK, I played with it, but since it was a personnel app, didn't use it that much.)