In the early days of personal computing, BASIC was the shit.

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>>58936778

compared to assembly it was easy

nowadays you can use a TI calculator and have the same experience of trying to use a mediocre language on suboptimal hardware

>>58936778
That seems comfy

>>58936778
It was easy for simple programs, easier than C or Java definitely, no boilerplate at all, no libraries or headerfiles, I/O was a build-in part of the core language. However, writing complex programs was more difficult, because you didn't really have encapsulation into functions - everything was in global scope, and the main control flow statement was the goto. There was also gosub (basically the same as the assembly function call instruction - push the program counter onto a stack, jump, and pop the program counter off the stack when you encounter a return statement), but there were no local variables - everything was in global scope, so if you had a subroutine that needed to store intermediate values, you needed to be careful that the variable names it used weren't used elsewhere in the program. This also meant recursion (other than tail recursion) was virtually impossible, since the variables would be overwritten with each call of the subroutine. It also had "functions" which were distinct from subroutines, and used the standard function call syntax used today, but were limited to mathematical expressions, and generally couldn't have side effects. You'd define them with something like

DEF FN CUBE(X)=X*X*X

. Also there was no API, all interactions with the operating system (which barely qualified as such) were done by writing values directly to memory, so for example changing the screen color was done by using the POKE statement to write a new value into the area of memory used for holding the state of the display.

>>58936778
Basic is easy but for first timers it teaches bad habits.

>>58937090
Thanks for this thorough insight into specs and limitations of BASIC. Did you learn it back in the days?

>>58937110
Like what?