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Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC

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On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 13:33:57 -0600
Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> wrote:

> I was trained on CORC/CUPL
>    Can you say I/O == "026/line printer"
> I want to prototype a problem.

Depends what type of problem. For many numerical problems, a
spreadsheet is a good prototyping language. In fact I still have a
spreadsheet for making certain types of PCB component footprints, it
does the job well enough that it wasn't worth doing it again
'properly'. I used a spreadsheet for calculating ModeLines for X, back
when they were necessary and a certain very common monitor resolution
wasn't available ready-made.

For a standalone database RAD tool, MS Access is unbeatable, though not
free or even cheap.


> What BASIC in Debian repository most resembles "Dartmouth BASIC"?
>

Why are you choosing Dartmouth BASIC as your target? After 'learning'
BASIC on Applesoft on an AppleII, which I suspect resembles the first
BASIC, I was overjoyed to find BBC Basic on an Acorn machine. Orders of
magnitude better. When I learned (non-object) Pascal, I wondered what
the fuss was about, it wasn't greatly removed from BBC Basic. Would
your problem benefit from recursion? If so, the earliest BASICs are
probably of little use. But of course it is easy to ignore the more
advanced bits of any BASIC, and just use the primitive parts.

And so on.... you're learning, so learn the software tool most
appropriate to your problem. I always picked an application that would
be of actual use to me when learning another language, language
tutorials tend to choose easy examples (who really has a use for the
Towers of Hanoi?), and avoid the real-world tricky bits. You find the
tricky bits quite quickly when you try to write a program that does
something useful.

For example, as far as I could tell, it is impossible to write a
completely 'legal' duplex serial driver in Python, though the subtleties
of it escape me now, and I was able to bodge something that worked. It
was something of the order of two objects down near hardware level that
each needed to be created before the other, or something similar. But
there was a slightly iffy way around it.

-- 
Joe

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Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2021-02-25 20:40 +0100
  Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2021-02-25 21:00 +0100
    Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC Doug McGarrett <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2021-02-26 00:20 +0100
      Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC ghe2001 <ghe2001@protonmail.com> - 2021-02-26 00:40 +0100
        Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> - 2021-02-26 02:20 +0100
      Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2021-02-26 01:00 +0100
  Re: Looking for ~Dartmouth BASIC Joe <joe@jretrading.com> - 2021-02-25 23:20 +0100

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