On Sunday, 22 November 2015 at 07:36:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
15 years ago, everyone loved to bash BASIC as a terrible language. I did too. But then I was looking at some Visual Basic code for a friend, and noticed something I had forgotten - it was really easy to manipulate strings. I was used to the horrible way of dealing with strings in C. I resolved that D had to have strings as nice as BASICs, and pretty much succeeded.
Just about all 8 bit computers shipped with BASIC and it was quite reasonable as a scripting language/CLI as Microsoft had a relatively memory efficient VM for it.
One could do cool stuff in BASIC by adding small pieces of machine language to do the heavy lifting, just like you can with Python or Lua today. But the line numbering system was annoying.
(Perl, sed etc are still the most concise languages for string manipulation...)
