Re: Rewrite BASIC language today?

On Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:38:32 +0200, Gordon Rahman wrote:

> so further more
> - give it hardware abbility like ****t reading - open and use any DLL you
> like with it

If it's going to run on a modern multitasking operating system, 
unrestricted access to the hardware is a Bad Thing.  Suppose my program 
wants to grab the printer ****t, but another job happens to be printing?

What if I try to use two DLLs that have different parameter-passing 
conventions?  If I pass an integer to a routine that expects a pointer, 
the best I can expect is for my program to abort.  The worst depends on 
how good the operating system is about enforcing memory protection.  Any 
of the POSIX family will probably just kill the offending process, but 
Windows could do anything from the BSOD to allowing silent corruption of 
another program's data.

I favor implementations that allow a beginner to use a subset, but have 
resources that he can pick up later.  FreeBASIC, for example, will let 
you use most of the old Dartmouth conventions: line numbers, global 
variables, GOSUB/RETURN subroutines.  It does (unless you use a compiler 
switch to set QBasic mode) require you to declare your variables, but 
that's a good habit to get into from the beginning.  Of course, FreeBASIC 
is far from simple internally.  It's GPL'd freeware, so I downloaded the 
source tree.  A lot of it, though written to complie itself, isn't 
immediately recognizable as BASIC.