Timeline for BASIC-PLUS inline operators, do they actually make sense?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 27, 2023 at 15:03 | comment | added | Will Hartung | @JohnCierra this is a bit of lost knowledge as far as I know. I would love to hear some of the design motivations and decisions behind both how BP was design and MS was designed. Everyone stands on the shoulders of someone else, curious what their inspirations were that led to the decisions that were made. But I fear many of these stories are now lost. Perhaps Bill Gates knows, but who can say about the creators of the original BP. | |
| Jun 26, 2023 at 22:56 | comment | added | John Cierra | @WillHartung, your motivations are so thoughtful! Software is often a quilt of many colors, each feature added by someone who had a great idea; not all great ideas make good sense in retrospect. BASIC-PLUS is this way. Much of RSTS/E is this way. When I worked on that team in the early 1980s, there was a "bug of the week"; the engineer in the cubicle next to mine got his award by using an assembler GOTO instead of a RETURN (but, surprising to everyone, it did not matter!). BASIC-PLUS was the product of many hands. Some ideas were not that good. | |
| Jun 25, 2023 at 21:42 | comment | added | Will Hartung | I can see how it saves memory, but it's more of a question of how they went down this path in the first place. BP is not a particularly memory efficient system, especially when compared to the MS model. Curious how many modifier based statements were necessary to recoup the losses in memory necessary due to the complexity added to the compiler to handle the new syntax. IF A=1 THEN B=2 vs B=2 IF A=1, a "60%" savings of 6 characters in text space. FOR I=1 TO 10:A=A+1:NEXT I vs A=A+I FOR I=1 TO 10, a 36% savings of 7 characters. | |
| Jun 24, 2023 at 13:48 | comment | added | dave | BASIC-PLUS-2 was not introduced until RSTS/E added multiple RTS support, and in particular had an RTS that emulated RSX-11M system calls. RSTS-11, and RSTS/E prior to V6, only had BASIC-PLUS available. | |
| Jun 24, 2023 at 13:42 | comment | added | dave | I'm not convinced of the 'saving memory' argument. I would argue from the point of view of programmer expressiveness. Note that Python has 'post-fixed' conditionals and looping, particularly in contexts such as list comprehensions. | |
| Jun 24, 2023 at 3:27 | review | Late answers | |||
| Jun 24, 2023 at 19:29 | |||||
| S Jun 24, 2023 at 3:09 | review | First answers | |||
| Jun 24, 2023 at 3:24 | |||||
| S Jun 24, 2023 at 3:09 | history | answered | John Cierra | CC BY-SA 4.0 |