Python - The Emperor's New Clothes

I recently posted a couple of examples of a starfield simulation written in BASIC.  One of these was written in Commodore BASIC for the VIC-20.  The other was written in Liberty BASIC for Windows.

BASIC gets a lot of flack from people with a certain kind of snob factor (yes, you know who you are).  And there is the infamous comment by Edsger Dijkstra, and BASIC has never lived it down.  Nowadays when you see people discussing what is the best first language I probably see Python mentioned most.  In these forum discussions someone always seems to snidely denounce BASIC as that old thing with the GOTO and the unreadable spaghetti code.  They don't seem to have a good reason to recommend Python, except that it isn't BASIC.

People also recommend C and it's derivatives such as C++ which also has GOTO.  So go figure.

Wait, here is something scandalous!  On the Python Software Foundation website, in their design and history FAQ page, they actually answer the question about why there is no GOTO in Python by encouraging people to use exception handling as a hack to simulate something like GOTO!  Ummmm.   See for yourself.  https://docs.python.org/3/faq/design.html#why-is-there-no-goto

Okay, getting back to the starfield simulation example.  If you look at the version of the starfield simulation written in Liberty BASIC, it addresses some of the things that BASIC is frowned on about.

• GOTO - Uh oh, not really.  There is one GOTO, but in this case I'm not sure a WHILE/WEND forever loop is really better, so...  The Commodore BASIC version has three GOTOs.
• Structure - The Liberty BASIC version uses control structures properly the way modern languages do.
• Line numbers - Liberty BASIC programs do not require numbers.  You can give your routines meaningful names instead of numbers.

Okay, let's be frank.  Liberty BASIC was not the first version of BASIC to solve these problems.  There are many BASICs with modern features, and so it isn't fair to criticize BASIC as being a bad language for beginners.  BASIC has been a proper language for teaching good programming practices for a very long time now.

What do you think?  Comments welcome.  :-)

The SBASIC Preprocessor

I had become familiar with structured programming ideas from my casual experimentation with Forth. I wanted to do something to improve the quality of my Microsoft BASIC programming. I realized that I could write a program that would take BASIC source code without line numbers, and adding in named labels for the GOTO and GOSUB targets and output line numbered BASIC. Then I could run this code in an interpreter or compile it. This was a cool idea for me. After having done the CNC simulator this lit up a part of my brain that brought me closer to realizing that a compiler is just another kind computer program that treats source code as data.

I wasn't familiar with QuickBASIC at that time, so I didn't use Microsoft's syntax for this. Instead I used square brackets for branch labels like so:

[loopHere]
  a = a + 1
  print a
  if a = 10 then [quit]
  goto [loopHere]

[quit]
  print "done."
  end

Liberty BASIC programmers will recognize this syntax. I called this preprocessor SBASIC for Structured BASIC.

Here's what it looks like in QuickBASIC:

loopHere:
  a = a + 1
  print a
  if a = 10 then quit
  goto loopHere

quit:
  print "done."
  end

I think that my syntax is better. It certainly is more consistent because in QuickBASIC the branch label will either be quit or quit: but in SBASIC it is always [quit].

So here we see a direct precursor to Liberty BASIC. At this time I did not have plans to create my own BASIC. That wouldn't come for four more years.