#: 5609 S15/Hot Topics
    27-Jul-90  09:40:56
Sb: #5596-Is Basic out of date?
Fm: Pete Lyall 76703,4230
To: Bob van der Poel 76510,2203

Yes, brother Bob, it's always good to hear from a newly saved soul (grin)!

Pointers are a but indigestible at first, but make rampant sense once you get
the hang of them. Candidly, I never have used anything with more than two
layers of indirection (i.e. char **woof), but some folks] revel in that stuff.

I'm taking a languages course at the moment, and we have to write 3 projects in
3 languages in 10 weeks. So far the cut has been project 1 was Pascal (Cobol,
Fortran, and Algol68 were the other options). #2 was either Prolog or Lisp (I
chose Prolog), and #3 is Smalltalk, ADA, or C++ (with emphasis on the object
orientation). The point of all this is that I now _really appreciate_ C's
terseness. It may steepen the initial ramp, but is a blessing thereafter,
brother Bob!

I neither like or dislike b09... it's just been too long since I have used it.
I recall that as Basics went, it was pretty slick. Major drawbacks are the
availabilty of reusable code (i.e. linkable libraries), requirement for life
support (Runb), and non-portability.

Pete