[Coco] Hungry Basic09? (was: Weird errors...

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Michael and Holli Ranck may have mentioned these words:
>Except for the memory hungry nature of it (Which is typical of an 
>interpreted language anyway) I always liked Basic09.

"Memory hungry" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Sure, it's 40K, but compared to RSBasic's 24K-32K (depending on which DOS 
you had - and yes, you need to add DOS to compare apples to apples), I 
could make a lot smaller programs do more, more quickly, and more 
easily.... All in all, given 64K either way (as a process in OS-9 Level 2 
still had a max of 64K) I actually found Basic09 much *less* restrictive...

>   I'd have to agree though its too structured to be BASIC and too strange 
> to be anything else.

Define "strange?" It's just a Basic/Pascal mix... So what if it's not AKC 
registered??? ;-)

>Leon Howell <puritan_2076 at yahoo.com> wrote:
 >> And an unnamed, no longer attributed "someone" wrote:

> > Besides, BASIC-09's complexities are just the result of running under
> > a real OS that provides real, complicated services to the user
> > programs.
>
>Ok, first, no, "basic"-09 is not basic, it's Fortran.

Having never written in Fortran, I had to look at the syntax, and there 
*are* similarities - but there are more than enough differences that I'd 
have to disagree. There are a *lot* more parallels between Basic09 and 
Pascal than Basic09 and Fortran, IMHO...

However, if one were to say that early Basics might have been an attempt at 
"Fortran for Dummies" I don't think I could disagree... ;-)

>You don't compile "basic"-09, you compact it or
>something,

The technical term is "pack." ;-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |