Re: Rewrite BASIC language today?

On Sat, 10 May 2008 23:50:35 -0700 (PDT), rhnlogic
<rhnlogic@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

<snip>
>
>Completely useless for the target audience, Beginners,
>who know and should have to know nothing about IOCTLs
>and such.  What there should be are just simple and
>almost obvious commands, such as
>PRINT for printing on the ASR-33 teletype,
>Beep and Sound for computers with speakers,
>maybe Spin Left and Spin Right for computers with propellers.
I have no problem with statements like PRINT, LOCATE, COLOR, CLS,
BEEP, SOUND, INPUT and maybe even LPRINT (which I don't sup****t in
BCET).  Those could be considered to be basic I/O statements.  (Pun
intended)  :-)

My problem is with having to sup****t a multitude of various oddball
serial ****ts, USB ****ts, parallel ****ts, . . .

And just look at all the various adapters that are sup****ted by the
SCREEN statement - 6 in PDS, 8 in QBasic.  I just think it would have
been better if those were handled by drivers, and not in Basic.

>Of course, that's neither extensible nor ****table; but other
>languages are better architected for those purposes; no need
>to make Basic as unusable for Beginners by adding the flaws
>of those other languages.
And another question might be: How often to beginners actually use any
I/O except for the keyboard, display and printer?  And data files, of
course.
-- 
ArarghMail805 at [drop the 'http://www.'
from ->] http://www.arargh.com
BCET Basic Compiler Page: http://www.arargh.com/basic/index.html

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