Quote:
Originally Posted by yash101
I program my Propeller in C. I really like it because it is easier to program than BASIC. The problem in BASIC is that the lack of a god syntax makes it harder to efficiently code a program, and even harder to debug it!
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PBASIC is really a slightly tweaked version of BASIC. I think BASIC gets a very undeserved bad reputation. I've been writing code in one flavor of BASIC or another for everything from robotics (MegaBASIC, TinyBASIC, PBASIC, PICBASIC Pro, BASCOM-AVR, MikroBASIC) to very important business applications for decades. How important? Important enough to change the world's economy.
It's just another language. Every so often someone decides they've got a better idea and they write up a whole new language. I've worked in so many programming languages now I can hardly remember all their names. Especially with BASIC. Sometimes the justification for the rewrite is to target functionality that someone else does not value. Fine but in reality after you program long enough the whole language of the moment issue becomes quite secondary to whether the language in question is the fastest and most suitable way to achieve something.
I am often confronted by people that have not a clue about a modern version of BASIC but they assume it's no different than say GW-BASIC. BASIC was at one point even Microsoft's answer to the operating system of choice for the Commodore 64/128 family of computers.
I think it's been years since I've seen someone use a GOTO statement which was one of the very concepts that gave BASIC the reputation for disorganized code. However it's funny to note that the concept for the GOTO statement is very much the assembly language jump. Since it's not uncommon for compiled languages to produce assembly language it's not like the concept went away.
The point is not that BASIC is superior.
It's just another option to be explored.
To see the real power of what BASIC can do consider that at one time Microsoft's sales of VisualBASIC were enormous till they changed the syntax and effectively made dysfunctional huge numbers of 3rd party tools in the latest version. I still find VB6 16bit code out in the wild today and effectively that's the model for Microsoft Office's VisualBASIC for Applications which is still alive and well today. I wrote 12 macros this week alone in Excel using VBA. There are Excel APIs and tool kits throughout the financial industry today that can trace their roots back to me and VBA.
That said if you wanna make a living programming it's hard to ignore: C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, .NET
Spin looks a lot like PBASIC but really because of the differences from the PIC to the Propeller it's another BASIC-like language.