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

On Aug 27, 5:12 am, "Judson McClendon" <ju...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> How many people, do you think, are still using
> the 1981 version with no improvements for serious work?
> My guess is, not many. :-)

This depends on what you mean by "serious work".  I receive
email from professors in various non-CS related fields (e.g.
astronomy, mechanics, biology, etc.) who are using Chipmunk
Basic for either research purposes or textbooks.  The language
features that they are using have been substantially unchanged
from the days of the Basic for CP/M.  The improvements they
are looking for are not changes to the Basic programming
language, but implementation adaptations to allow running
fairly old-fa****oned Basic on multiple and cross-platform
contem****ary OS releases and CPU's.

Most everybody I know doing "serious work" in software
engineering is using C/C++, Java, Javascript, Python, and
maybe Fortran for scientific supercomputing.

Thus I consider the primary niche for Basic, not implementation
for serious software engineering, but accessibility for people
who have no training in programming or software engineering,
but who never-the-less need to get some "Basic" computational
or algorithmic work accomplished.  There seem to be no other
current "popular" languages to fulfill that need.


IMHO. YMMV.
--
rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M