Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #623583Re: The birth of BASIC
From: Charles Richmond
Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2018 05:54
Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2018 05:54
28 lines
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3288 bytes
On 6/1/2018 5:21 PM, Quadibloc wrote: > On Friday, June 1, 2018 at 3:09:44 PM UTC-6, Sarr Blumson wrote: > >> And, to kick one of my favorite dead horses, Dartmouth BASIC was >> NOT an interpreter. It compiled to real machine code. Other >> implementations varied. > > Yes, that's quite true, it was, I presume, one of those "load-and-go" compiler > systems; quite a few of those had already been written for FORTRAN by that time. > > But _after_ Dartmouth BASIC, nearly all the other implementations were > interpreters. Quite a bit later, of course, it was considered worthwhile to make > compilers for BASIC that let you save the object... CBASIC, Borland's Turbo > BASIC, and so on. Microsoft's BASICA, GW-BASIC, and so on, were interpreters, > while QBASIC compiled, although it didn't let you save the object - a lot like > the original Dartmouth BASIC. > Sometimes BASIC would be compiled *not* to machine language, but to some mid-level code that was much easier to interpret than working from the original BASIC source code. Although the mid-level language was *not* as efficient as the machine code would have been, this still would speed along the interpreter quite a bit. For example, a FOR loop that executed its code 10,000 times would take *much* longer if you had to re-translate the source of each statement every time through the loop! -- numerist at aquaporin4 dot com
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X-Received: by 2002:a1c:e908:: with SMTP id q8-v6mr1013417wmc.15.1527918879909; Fri, 01 Jun 2018 22:54:39 -0700 (PDT) X-BeenThere: alt.folklore.computers@googlegroups.com Received: by 2002:a1c:a010:: with SMTP id j16-v6ls1089712wme.5.canary-gmail; Fri, 01 Jun 2018 22:54:39 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 2002:a1c:f50e:: with SMTP id t14-v6mr966231wmh.27.1527918879462; Fri, 01 Jun 2018 22:54:39 -0700 (PDT) Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!d26-v6ni9253wmb.0!nntp.google.com!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Charles Richmond <nume...@aquaporin4.com> Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The birth of BASIC Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2018 00:54:52 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 28 Message-ID: <petbev$a70$1@dont-email.me> References: <874lisvjda.fsf@usenet.ankman.de> <Td6dncF4Z8KWVJHGnZ2dnUU7-anNnZ2d@giganews.com> <pejcmg$ucc$1@dont-email.me> <pekt3k021q7@news3.newsguy.com> <87a7sf7cpo.fsf@usenet.ankman.de> <6c294b10-022f-48d3-b122-f1eaa7bee464@googlegroups.com> <439a1044-9919-4234-ad93-d8741b1bd71c@googlegroups.com> <pescmn$m7o$1@dont-email.me> <cb11f87e-44a9-4f0b-b4b3-998177600274@googlegroups.com> Reply-To: nume...@aquaporin4.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Injection-Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2018 05:54:39 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: h2725194.stratoserver.net; posting-host="17423c4a169316faa9be3756f8b8b247"; logging-data="10464"; mail-complaints-to="ab...@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/yJMeeTe9d3HGvsNhbZURpatLTu2NkXgY=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:d97fWq9GNPzDsdJ3g6N5p5Fn/vE= In-Reply-To: <cb11f87e-44a9-4f0b-b4b3-998177600274@googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit