Why use Basic at all? (was Re: BASIC with built-in matrix functions?)

On Aug 22, 11:34 am, ted rosenberg <tedrosenb...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I can't imagine any statistician using BASIC when you have
> a lot more
> powerful methods available today.

That brings up an interesting question:
 Why use Basic at all?

I can think of a few reasons (which may or may not
be good ones).

Ease of learning:
Basic was designed for teaching and ease-of-learning
for non-CS students.
Very little punctuation or other complex syntactical
elements are required to write short programs.
Arithmetic syntax is very straightforward infix.

Concreteness:
There are directly interactive implementations of
Basic.
The primary data types are concrete (not complex
containers or abstract objects).
Basic can be more directly mapped from a simple
human readable form onto simple CPU machine
representations than can other scripting languages
(e.g. GOTO and global A[I])

Ease of implementation:
Minimal Basic can be implemented on fairly simple
small computing systems (e.g. Tiny Basic was the
first high level language on the first homebrew
microcomputer systems, PalmPilots, PIC microchips,
etc.).  It was one of the first time-shared user
programming environments, and on minicomputers
less powerful than todays pocket calculators.

History:
Use of a programming language which one has learned
long ago can be far more efficient than one with which
one is unfamiliar (and that takes time); and Basic
was extremely common on PC's between two and three
decades ago.
No other general purpose teaching language (Logo, etc.)
has gained as wide spread distribution or sup****t.
No other small concrete language (Forth, etc.) has
gained as wide spread distribution or sup****t.

Experimental programming tool:
Unlike the more advanced (statistical, etc.) tools
now available, implementing algorithms in a simple
programming language can give one more insight into
the internals of a process, or computation itself.


So my guess is that a statistician would be using
Basic because he/she wants to program some algorithm
themselves and doesn't already know some more
advanced language; or that a student learning
Basic wants to do some statistical experiments
within a familiar programming environment.


IMHO. YMMV.
--
rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M
 Chipmunk Basic: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic