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

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:25:42 -0500, "Stephen J. Rush"
<sjrush@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:47:12 -0400, Happy Trails wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:57:01 -0400, ted rosenberg
>> <tedrosenberg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> 
>>>BASIC is a nice simple little language, but LOTS of languages will doi 
>>>anything it will plus.
>>>
>>><y favorite was always APL(mich more poerful than BASIC) but FORTRAN 
>>>will do anything BASIC will do
>> 
>> Was there ever a Fortran with the immensely powerful string processing
>> features inherent in Basic?
>
>That's Microsoft-style BASIC, with strings kept on a garbage-collected
>heap.  There have been BASICs that treated strings as arrays of
>characters, with a fixed maximum length.  Even the original MS BASIC
>didn't allow a single string to be longer than 255 characters.  If you're
>thinking "Wait a minute, GW-BASIC..." I was referring to the *first*
>MS BASICs, on the now-forgotten eight-bit processors.

I don't really care how they were stored, I was referring to the very
complete set of functions for manipulating string data that was part
of the (MS) Basics that I knew and loved.  They made it very easy to
process data that might be in files, or typed in by a user, that could
have a lot less of the very strict structure implied that was such a
pain with for example a COBOL program.  I continually see software
today that has the dopiest bunch of rules for input and still cannot
manage to process the data a user might type, and can't help thinking
that part of it must be that the guys today are hampered by not having
even the tools to handle the data that basic provided 15 years ago.

( - and I KNOW there is no Fortran compiler with this!).