I've used Turbo Basic which, as I recall, didn't use line numbers,
compiled very quickly, and was superior to the Fortran of its day -as
well as being superior in programming and application to the Pascal or
C++ of its day. It was tedious to program (less so than C++) but
debugging was easy - however the APL+PC V11 which was all I had as a
reasonable alternative was much more compact and allowed concentration
on the problem to be solved rather than the details which, in most cases
could be assigned to the " idiot which counts really fast on his
fingers"; but somewhat slower for iterative applications. I then
converted some stuff to visual Basic- which allowed a nice interface but
really no better performance.
I prefer J over the alternatives but - believe me- the dictionary of J
is not equivalent to what Gilbert &Rose did for APL. It does seem to
have a steeper learning curve than APL but, at my age all hills are
steep. Recognize that the first program I wrote was in MAD (Michigan
Algorithmic Decoder) with punch card input - about 1961. It was superior
to the Fortran of it's day and errors were greeted by an ASCII cartoon
of Alfred E. Neuman and the message "This is MAD!"
I do a lot of experimentation to get what I want in a compact form- try
this- Oh S--t! it doesn't work - try a variation- OK but then it fails
for something I didn't consider- This forum has provided a lot of
support and assistance that is very much appreciated.
Don Kelly
On 02/12/2012 1:52 AM, Linda Alvord wrote:
After quite a few years teaching J, I taught Basic for a semester (poorly). I struggled
to consider teaching the High School course in Advanced Placement Computer Science and
could make no sense of it and declined the "opportunity".
I did find that several years of teaching Visual Basic at a two year community college
was helpful for manipulating images and actually doing practical things. It was as close
as I ever came to "real programming" as opposed to J.
Linda
-----Original Message-----
From: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com
[mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] On Behalf Of R.E. Boss
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 4:25 AM
To: programm...@jsoftware.com
Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edsgerdijk201164.html
or, as I heard him say much shorter: "Basic ruins your life".
R.E. Boss
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com
[mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] Namens Boyko
Bantchev
Verzonden: zondag 2 december 2012 0:10
Aan: programm...@jsoftware.com
Onderwerp: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork
On 1 December 2012 16:17, Ian Clark <earthspo...@gmail.com> wrote:
A "training wheels" form of J, tailored to people who know BASIC,
would be so easy to write.
Not necessarily. A BASIC thinking can be so different that hardly any
tailoring could possibly exist as a bridge to J.
Here is a story.
True BASIC is the modern realization of Kemeny & Kurtz's original
BASIC. The product is priced at $500. Its web site says that
'thousands of schools, colleges, corporations, and laboratories use
True BASIC'. Like the original BASIC, True BASIC's principal target
area of application is education.
But … there are no first-class Boolean values in this language, or
anything in their place. There are no Boolean (or equivalent)
constants. Boolean expressions can only be used as conditions in
statements like IF and DO WHILE, but they are not supposed to have
values. The outcome of Boolean expressions cannot be stored in a
variable, passed as an argument or returned from a function.
Among other things said of this BASIC is that 'it helps … teach the
foundational principles of logic'. Yet, in the tutorials and other
teaching and learning aids one never finds problems that explicitly
involve logic. The latter is no surprise: logical calculations are a
hard thing to do without logical values.
'True BASIC' programmers don't even realize that not having a form of
Boolean in the language is a limitation. This is a world with almost
no common points with the expression-based world of J.
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