Just a friendly internet nerd with a website =)
fortune | cowsay
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/ Now, however it was initially intended, \
| I think BASIC turned out to be one of |
| the first major scripting languages, |
| especially the extended version that |
| DEC put onto its minicomputers called |
| BASIC/PLUS, which happily included |
| recursive functions with arguments. I |
| started out as a BASIC programmer. Some |
| people would say that I'm permanently |
| damaged. Some people are undoubtedly |
| right. |
| |
| But I'm not going to apologize for |
| that. All language designers have their |
| occasional idiosyncrasies. I'm just |
| better at it than most. :-) |
| |
| Anyway, when I was a RSTS programmer on |
| a PDP-11, I certainly treated BASIC as |
| a scripting language, at least in terms |
| of rapid prototyping and process |
| control. I'm sure it warped my brain |
| forever. Perl's statement modifiers are |
| straight out of BASIC/PLUS. It even had |
| some cute sigils on the ends of its |
| variables to distinguish string and |
| integer from floating point. |
| |
| But you could do extreme programming. |
| In fact, I had a college buddy I did |
| pair programming with. We took a |
| compiler writing class together and |
| studied all that fancy stuff from the |
| dragon book. Then of course the |
| professor announced we would be |
| implementing our own language, called |
| PL/0. After thinking about it a while, |
| we announced that we were going to do |
| our project in BASIC. The professor |
| looked at us like were insane. Nobody |
| else in the class was using BASIC. And |
| you know what? Nobody else in the class |
| finished their compiler either. We not |
| only finished but added I/O extensions, |
| and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid |
| prototyping. |
| |
| -- Larry Wall |
| |
| -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go |
\ Scripting" ( ) /
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