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

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:23:13 -0400, Paul Bartlett <bartlett@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, 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?
>
>A number of years ago I was working in an IBM MVS mainframe
>environment.  I needed to write a series of programs that did a fair
>amount of string parsing.  My programming choices were these: COBOL,
>FORTRAN 77, or S/370 assembly language.  At that time, at least, F77
>had some string handling functions compared to COBOL, and assembly
>would have been a major pain in that context, so I wrote the programs
>in F77.  Had something like GW-BASIC, warts and all, been available,
>my task would have been considerably easier.

I would have chosen COBOL, probably for no other reason than when I
was once faced with such a task, COBOL was about the only thing
available, and that's what I was programming in at the time.

I did a small receivables system once that ran off inout from frieden
flexowriters.  They were like heavy duty typewriter-like machines that
hammered out 6-part invoice forms and had a paper  tape punch attached
that captured all the data.

We converted the paper tape to mag tape and inputted it to an IBM 360
system.  I wrote a COBOL program that read the paper tape - I think I
remember it came in on 100 chr fixed-sized records - and I had to
convert it to ascii characters and parse it into meaningful invoice
data.  It was the only time in my life I ever used the TRANSFORM verb
in COBOL.