that would be an awesome endeavour. i dont think it will ever happen (unless an ai is tasked with it) because the people most interested in formalising that sort of task wouldnt be interested in an objective measure of the merits.Did you formalise your comparisons of BASIC versions in any way?
i would, but for my evaluations i would need to cross reference decades of research around usability and human psychology to get the results that mean the most to me. instead, i just went for the more conventional trial-and-error/iterative approach. its cheaper, and better yet its not limited to existing solutions.
short version: most people just want to convince you to use their own solution. i encourage (and teach) people to create their own solutions to this, but i am happy to provide my example(s) for inspirations.
i prefer fig, but for just one person i created a new dialect based on fig, called rose. one of the cool things about rose is that it marries the ordered python list with the dictionary-- and it is based on the dictionary, thus taking in all of its advantages, but when you use the array features in an ordered fashion you lose a bit of speed. the advantage is that you only have to learn one type of array to get the benefits of two. for beginners i think this is cool.
for most people, sure. if you prefer bacon for some reason, use that. ive used yad before, its a good tool. qb64 would probably get you to a result with less effort, but my experience with bacon is limited. you might find a better quality result doing it your way. but do note i was comparing qb64 to fb, not to bacon.And you think q64 might be a better way to reinvigorate auld structured and unstructured games/programs rather than a BaCon-yad route to convert the code into tiny modern apps?
i assumed so. i doubt anyone is going to go farther than qb64 for compatibility-- though be sure you look at pc-basic too: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/I guess I wanted a project/environment/hobby I could work on to create something while retaining my original sense of discipline - without having to learn the foibles of a "new" computer language.
because for very old stuff, it is a full-featured basica interpreter/emulator.
i tried adding features once. pc-basic isnt just an interpreter, it is a full-on retrocomputing experience. the way its designed is intended to replicate the same environment for basic programs-- with the same limitations, and it is meticulously implemented in a way that makes it incredibly tedious to work around. at least thats what i found. i was able to change screen 9 (gw-basic had no screen 12, that was a qb mode) to be higher resolution.
i hear you.But your insights have encouraged me to look seriously at supplanting my interest with Python. Unfortunately, no hobby-time for me
we are lucky we dont have proprietary alphabets today. the dewey decimal system used by libraries is under copyright, and very expensive. we could make a free version sure, but it would be unfamiliar, so theres a library using 20th century (technically 19th century) technology with microsoft/apple-like "lock-in."In a related project I have been writing a paper related to the evolution of the Western alphabet. Current thinking is that many of the modern letters were based on the hieroglyphics (literally "sacred text") of the Ancient Egyptians. They were a combination of pictograms/logograms depicting entire concepts, syllables and even a few phoneme sounds - the latter being the basis for the modern alphabet system. However, over time the hieroglyphs expanded from about 200 commonly-used symbols that basically everyone could read - to over 6000 that only the scribes and priests had a working knowledge of. They preserved their own self-importance by bamboozling everyone else - the original "knowledge economy"?
i was confused by the part about the alphabet, i thought it was common knowledge (from school, before wikipedia existed) that we got our letters from the phoenicians. but going to wikipedia for more information (theyve never been wrong about anything before, heh) i guess i learned something today, thanks:
The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet,[3] which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it from a true alphabet). In turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script[4] influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended.
its very tedious work to teach something esoteric to everyone. i was interested in python partly because basic no longer held the ground it did with beginners. it has features i always wanted in basic-- multitype arrays, dynamic typing, but i didnt want "fancy" i just wanted "easier."I guess I am wary of modern computer languages which might similarly work to alienate the common folk with more esoteric functions and constructs... or maybe I'm just being a neophyte. Dunno.
problem is, python has some features that are easier to use than basic-- and basic has some that are easier than python.
i wanted the best of both. but these languages that have everything in the Out house sink-- they do take a little of the old fun out of it.
which is why i used < 100 commands, made the very most of those, and made it expandable via a second language-- just like basic did in the 80s.
i really wanted the locate and color commands back though. pity that inkey$ is such a pain to implement from python, and platform-specific too. input$(1) can be implemented in puppy/debian/arch/etc by using read with arrshell, at least for most uses. its not a built-in because all the other features are cross platform.