Re: BASIC & strings [Was: Why use Basic at all? (was Re: BASIC with

On Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:12:29 -0500, Judson McClendon wrote:

> "Phred" <ppnerkDELETETHIS@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> "Judson McClendon" <judmc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>"Phred" <ppnerkDELETETHIS@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I still use GWBASIC (on Win XP Pro :) for playing around with data
>>>> that need to be "shuffled".  If the job is a bit more complex I use
>>>> QB4.5.  (And, if I can ever find my old PDS7.1 floppies, and if they
>>>> still work, I'll try to install that instead of using 4.5 ...
>>>
>>>Why in the world would you want to write anything in GWBASIC?
>>
>> Horses for courses.
>>
>> Some things are just quicker to do by invoking "GW" and typing in a
>> few lines of code.  But I agree with you, I also invoke "QB" for
>> anything that's a bit more complex, and especially if I see value in
>> saving a program to use again later.
> 
> My point is that it's *never* quicker! Consider:
> 
> GWBASIC:
> 
>     GWBASIC
>     1 PRINT "Hello World!"
> 
>     31 keystrokes.
> 
> QBASIC:
> 
>     QBASIC
>     PRINT "Hello World!"
> 
>     28 keystrokes.
> 
> And this is for a minimal program. Every single line you type will
require
> at least two more keystrokes for GWBASIC than QBASIC, up to 10
> lines (0-9), and from then on at least 3 more keystrokes. GWBASIC is
> never, ever, ever quicker! Even if you renamed the EXE files to a single
> letter, that line number on a single line will take more keystrokes with
> GWBASIC than QBASIC. Oh, and QBASIC will take '?' for print just
> like GWBASIC will, so there's no advantage there. Ever. Q.E.D. ;-)

Not to mention that the effort of writing a program is not linear in the
number of characters in it.  Any serious program is going to have a lot of
whitespace and comments, but the availability of Pascal-like control
structures and named procedures in QBasic and later implementations makes
programs easier to write.  Even more im****tant is the more powerful
hardware environment that makes it unnecessary to cram your code into
small memory and use a lot of GOTOs to save stack space.

I'll still take BASIC (almost any flavor) over one of the OOP systems that
needs a page of setup before you can display "Hello world!"  A
100-KLOC system could justify that much overhead, but I'll never write
anything that big.