The expressive power of BASIC

As I have been working on BINSIC – my reimplementation of BASIC as a domain specific language via Groovy- I have been increasingly struct by how unbelievably awful BASIC is (at least in the ZX80/ZX81 dialect that I am basing all this on).

basic coding

basic coding (Photo credit: Terry Freedman)

My memories of it are of a fun language where it was possible to quickly pull together some useful code to do the sorts of things 15, 16 and 17-year-old geeks were interested in.

But I really have to wonder now – it doesn’t even support user-defined functions: looking back I wonder why I wasn’t more enthused by PASCAL when I met it and its procedural programming paradigm at university: it certainly feels that I ought to have seen it as a fantastic improvement (though by then I was more into Z80 machine code than any high-level language).

But BASIC does have its strengths – as I have found out.

This piece of code is a prime example: 100 INPUT V

This means create the numeric variable called V and assign to it the value typed in by the user at the keyboard.

Trying to do this in Groovy/Java requires the creation of a whole new class just to handle the keyboard input, as well as mess about with thread synchronisation to ensure that the process waits for the input … what follows is just a part:

	def waitOnInput()
	{
		def textIn = binsicEngine.binsicWindow.textIn
		clearInputs(textIn)
		def countDown = new CountDownLatch(1)
		textIn.getInputMap().put(KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("ENTER"),
			BinsicConstants.INPUT)
		def inputAction = new BinsicInputAction(textIn, binsicEngine.preProc,
			countDown)
		textIn.getActionMap().put(BinsicConstants.INPUT, inputAction)
		countDown.await()
		return inputAction.result

	}
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