#: 4910 S15/Hot Topics
    05-Jul-90  18:29:14
Sb: #4871-#Is Basic out of date?
Fm: Kevin Darling (UG Pres) 76703,4227
To: Jim Williams 72157,3524 (X)

Jim,

Rexx would be nice. Also looking at other IPC mechanisms. There's no Rexx
manual uploaded anywhere, is there?

Basic: heh-heh, everyone has been saying that it's passe' for quite some time
now. Almost as dirty a word as "goto" in some forums . Still, more and
more people are writing into magazines wondering why it's put down... as it
still often is the first language learned by newcomers.

More importantly to this forum, OS-9 Basic is held in pretty high regard here.
Unlike many basics, Basic09 is very Pascal-like, very fast, and very useful.
It's not fancy (no built-in machine-specific commands), but very flexible.

Most BBS programs are written in it, many applications (including word
processors) are also, and anything you write in it can become yet another
command module to preload and/or call off disk. I myself, an avowed assembly
language nut, write most of my quickie utilities in basic09, as it's far easier
to write and interactively debug with, than C or asm are.

So while many people are getting into C here, Basic09 remains the structured
language of choice for many other OS9ers. See, we've been around so long that
passing fashions don't affect us . If we see something new, we chew it
over for a few years first, to see if it's the "right" way. Weird, eh?

There is 1 Reply.