The User's Column, December 1980, BYTE Magazine
BASIC, Computer Languages, and Computer Adventures Jerry Pournelle c/ o BYTE Publications 70 Main St Peterborough NH 03458 It's a typical Sunday afternoon here at Chaos Manor. new users become familiar with the way computers In one room a dozen kids are playing games on the Radio think, became studded with features. Every time you Shack TRS-80, while here in the office I've been playing turned around there was a new BASIC interpreter, each about with the C programming language after adding a one larger than the last, and almost none of them com check-writer to my accounting programs. My wife, the patible with each other. Whatever portability BASIC had only practical member of the family, gently reminds me enjoyed vanished in a myriad of disk operations, func of my deadlines: galley proofs of a new novel, King tions, WHILE statements, new input formats, etc, etc, David's Spaceship (Simon and Schuster); two chapters of and, at the same time, the "free" memory left over after the latest Niven/ Pournelie collaboration, Oath of Fealty loading BASIC got so small that you couldn't handle (Simon and Schuster, Real Soon Now); plus three col much data. umns; a speech to a librarians' convention; and inputs for The logical end of that process is Microsoft's newest a NASA study on America's fifty-year space plan. Some BASIC-BO. Understand, it's an excellent BASIC. It has business people worry about cash flow; for authors it's features that, not long ago, the most advanced languages work flow-work comes in bunches, like bananas, and didn't have.
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