classiccmp-digest V1 #690

From: Alan Pearson <Alan.Pearson_at_cramersystems.com>
Date: Fri Aug 17 03:27:02 2001

Various people wrote:

> CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instructional Language),

Ha ha, I'd forgotten about that one... I remember typing in a CESIL
interpreter into the Speccy from some magazine or other. It
was even slower than ZX BASIC though so I gave up on it after a couple
of weeks..

> If the eight-bitters had booted into Pascal, perhaps things would have
> looked differently?

For me the immediacy of an interpreted language was what made it fun, and
therefore encouraged me to find out more about programming.

We were taught PASCAL and 6809 assembly in my first year at college, both
excellent learning languages (one for high-level structured programming and
the other for the low-level 'how a computer computes' stuff) - both were
nowhere near as much fun as BASIC because you had to compile/assemble them
before you could "do anything". A lot of the time was spent learning the
language syntax ("why does it need a semicolon here" or "why does the opcode
need to go at least one space in") rather than learning programming
concepts, which I found a bit distracting. OK nowadays it's not a big deal
to pick up a new language, but when I was just starting out learning
non-intuitive rules about semicolons was quite a headache.

Compare the possible pitfalls in here (what are INPUT, OUTPUT? why no
semicolon after BEGIN and WHILE (TRUE)? why a full stop after the last END?
what does 'while true' really mean anyway? etc)

PROGRAM SayHello(INPUT, OUTPUT)
BEGIN
   WHILE (TRUE)
   BEGIN
      WRITELN('Hello World');
   END;
END.

when compared to this:

10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10

BASIC's appeal was its simplicity and immediacy. I don't agree with Wirth
that it pollutes the mind irrevocably either, I mostly use C++ or Java these
days and never have to use the much-maligned 'goto'. The only time I use
global data is for the occasional acceptable (even trendy!) "singleton"
design pattern :-)

--al

PS I guess my mind has been polluted though, I'd rather hack 68K any day ;-)
Received on Fri Aug 17 2001 - 03:27:02 BST