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video on the birth of BASIC
02-26-2019, 12:32 AM (This post was last modified: 02-26-2019 12:34 AM by Thomas Okken.)
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RE: video on the birth of BASIC
That's a very interesting video, thank you for sharing it!

I was born in 1964 so of course I grew up with BASIC on 8-bit machines. BASIC was just a part of the landscape by then. I knew ALGOL-60, which I also learned at the time, was older, and better in certain ways, but I had no idea that BASIC and time-sharing were conceived together, linked somewhat like C and Unix were later on.

I also find it interesting that Kemeny didn't like ALGOL. That may have sounded like heresy at the time, but he was not wrong. ALGOL provided good ideas for what eventually became C, but it also had significant complexity for a compiler writer, because of two features in particular, call-by-name and nested functions. Thinking back, I find myself thinking, who could ever have thought those features were a good idea? Pascal dropped the former and C also the latter, and nobody misses them, I'm sure, but they were the result of the language being designed by mathematicians. It took contact with reality to tell the good ideas from the bad ones, and good on Kemeny for making the right calls on some big ones.

I wish I had heard of DTSS earlier. It'll be interesting to see what information I can dig up on it now!
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Messages In This Thread
video on the birth of BASIC - Don Shepherd - 02-25-2019, 03:50 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - Thomas Okken - 02-26-2019 12:32 AM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - ijabbott - 02-26-2019, 08:44 AM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - ijabbott - 02-28-2019, 12:01 AM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - KeithB - 02-26-2019, 04:30 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - Namir - 02-26-2019, 12:38 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - BruceH - 02-28-2019, 09:00 PM



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