Vision BASIC
visionbasic.net
visionbasic.net
Proudly boasting about features that were standard in Acorn's BBC BASIC in 1982 and which worked on an unexpanded 6502 machine with 16kB RAM, like inline assembly.
In any case, kudos to the author. It's a remarkable technical achievement. I'm just ambivalent about the gray area between developing on a stock C64 and using the plentiful FOSS available on my Linux laptop.
Secondly, even BASIC does strings, arrays and type safety better than C.
Rest assured we were more than aware of what the machine was doing.
It is an urban myth that C improves anything into that regard.
I’m pretty sure you know that, too. Otherwise, why not just jump straight into assembly? There’s no better way to learn what the hardware is actually doing, right?
#include <stdio.h>
int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); }
just as easy as:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
Later versions of BASIC like QBasic dropped the line numbers even. BASIC won because there was no friction and no ceremony involved with writing simple programs. Displaying text, getting input from the user, and doing simple mathematical calculations were relatively intuitive. Control flow was easy with GOTO. You could learn how to do all these things in an afternoon. Most microcomputer bundled BASICS even had primitive facilities for handling graphics, sound, and joysticks, so you had all you needed to make simple games. You could even PEEK and POKE at the memory, meaning you could even do some pretty advanced programming without reaching for C, Pascal, or Assembler.
Incidentally, I believe this is why Python is so popular today. It's just a saner iteration on BASIC in many aspects.