At 09:06 PM 7/27/2011, Rugxulo wrote:
>Hi,
>
>On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 10:37 PM, Ralf A. Quint <[email protected]> wrote:
> > At 11:08 PM 7/26/2011, Rugxulo wrote:
> >
> >>Well, .BAT isn't exactly Turing complete, last I checked.
> >
> > Why would that possibly matter?
>
>Hmmm? The whole point was about what is/was included by default, e.g.
>DEBUG vs. QBASIC or LINK or EXE2BIN vs. nothing. So .BAT is often
>called a "scripting language", but it's not even close to being useful
>for anything outside very simple things. I mean, I've seen some
>strange hacks, but .BAT is far from ideal for normal computations.
It's not supposed to do "computations", it's for file scripting. Do
due with what's available...
> >>GW-BASIC is fine if you like it. Most will complain about line
> >>numbers.
> >
> > What's wrong with line numbers?
>
>To me? Nothing besides a little inconvenience. To others it's a deal
>breaker. Look, I'm far from a BASIC guru (and I also like esolangs),
>so it wouldn't bother me. But I've read (over and over and over) about
>how people "hate BASIC" and "spaghetti code" from line numbers.
>Remember that QBASIC was hugely popular (and still is), and it was
>optional there. I'm no zealot, but the structured programming ideal
>had a fair point.
Yeah, it's easy for people to jump on a bandwagon when they hear/read
"over and over" things like this. But I am sure that not even a small
percentage of those folks that keep repeating that stuff never
actually used it (or even tried).
I have seen more "spaghetti code" in C/C++/Java/C#/Ruby/Python/etc
than I have ever seen in BASIC. It's not the programming language
that's used that is the problem, it's the programmer that doesn't
know how to use it (properly)...
> > As I already mentioned, too many people these days don't seem to
> > know/remember what DOS was and how it was used for more than a
> > decade. And nobody really complained and the PC world still kept
> advancing...
>
>Some of us can't remember because we weren't there. I only first used
>MS-DOS 6 in 1994.
Have been using DOS since January '82, when we got at a former
employer an IBM-PC on loan for 4 weeks from Computerland in Bonn. Was
running a modified PC DOS 1.01 to support the 10MB harddrive from
Corvus, with a whooping 256KB RAM.
Later that year, after we had to give the IBM back, we got one of the
first Sirus-1, a luxury model compared to the IBM, with 1.2MB floppy
drives, 896KB of RAM and 800x400 "highres" (mono) graphics. That one
had already MS-DOS 1.25. And before we had to give that one back, we
got (as HP software OEM) a prototype of the HP-150, running what was
becoming MS-DOS 2.01, 640KB RAM and 2x720KB 3.5" floppy drives. But
at that time, we preferred the HP-9816, a non-DOS 68000 based
"workstation", running HP ("Rocky Mountain")BASIC in ROM or UCSD
Pascal/FORTRAN from the same 9121 floppy drives from the HP-150, or
even the HP-85/86, also programmed/running in HP BASIC, all with line
numbers, still nice structured programs... ;-)
Ralf
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