BW> languages: BASIC does what I want.  For a younger
 BW> person who is interested in learning programming, I
 BW> would recommend BASIC (QB) as a good beginning,
 BW> followed by several other popular languages.  One will
 BW> find BASIC principles thru them all!
Howdy Bill,
There aren't many of us old foggies around that started out with only a hex 
keypad or banks of switches.  While we are advising some of the youngsters 
{grin}.
You can't be a good chemist without the atomic tables and how molecules 
behave.
Same thing for programming.  As you and I know, you need to start with 
achine
level coding in Assembly.  That gives you the nuts and bolts to know what the 
high level language statements are actually doing and how to optimize your 
coding efforts.
Flow charting is also very important.  If you can't organize and diagram 
chunks of a program on paper, you are going to have problems trying to 
organize the source code.  Those nice little plastic templates with diamonds 
and squares should be one of the first tools purchased towards a programming 
career.
Chris
--- FMail 0.96â
---------------