[Coco] Happy Birthday BASIC!

[Gregory Law]

While I never shunned BASIC on the Color Computer, I was never attracted 
to it because it lacked structure, could be very difficult to 
understand, and it had forced line numbers. I'm still not a fan of doing 
multiple things on line because doing so hides side effects that can be 
more difficult to discover.

Basic09 was very appealing when it was first introduced, although I 
never used it much. The structure of the language and the formatting of 
the code was a significant improvement. Compiling procedures into 
separate modules wasn't such a good idea because the 8K block size of 
the CoCo 3 MMU makes it really difficult to deal with. I still think it 
could have been a much better language if the procedures had been merged 
into the main procedure (similar to Pascal) and if it had supported 
libraries. The other disadvantage to this approach is that parameters 
are passed as strings and this involves a lot of parsing overhead.

On 5/2/2017 2:40:24 PM, "Salvador Garcia via Coco" 
<coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:

>Something that I did not locate in that Wiki entry is that the original 
>BASIC was a compiled language.
>
>Seeing how many shunned BASIC because it was interpreted, I believe 
>that this is an important item.
>
>And if anyone feels nostalgic, you can still program like it is 1964 
>here:
>
>http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/program-in-basic-like-it-is-1964/
>
>
>
>Salvador