Re: BASIC turns 60

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> writes:

I myself have semi-fond memories of typing in BASIC programs from some
magazine into my 8-bit PC, and then struggling to understand what the
hell I was doing.

I remember much the same. Even worse, when I got a Commodore VIC-20 and
tried to type in some hot game from a magazine, turned out it didn't
work and also the tape drive didn't work... In fact it was the third or
fourth VIC-20 which finally worked fully. I kinda lost the taste for
typing in things then I think although I think there was some simple
type in game for the C-64 I and some friends actually played.

And programming anything on the Microsoft crap basic 2.0 was awful
anyways but that was more Commodore's fault. I remember I got a Super
Expander cartridge for the VIC which included some graphics drawing
commands and had some fun with that.

So at least I did learn something about programming with BASIC, in fact
I spent a week in a geeky summer camp which included some BASIC
classes. But that week was 1% learning, 99% playing and copying games...

Still, my fumblings with the Commodores and the BASIC remained, well,
basic. I fumbled with machine code in a monitor too, trying to get some
graphical stuff working but it was just so much toil for so little
effect I never got any good with that. In retrospect I wonder how come
no one seemed to have even an assembler for development, everyone was just
fumbling in BASIC and machine code in a monitor.

Anyways, I minored in software development in my university studies but
have never really programmed professionally, other than little tools for
mangling this or that, usually some kind of text based data from one
format into other. But boy, was I lucky in that some of the software
courses thought Unix shell programming and C. The former is still useful
40 years later and in my hardware and DSP courses, C programming skill
was assumed. In different years basic programming concepts had been
taught in Scheme and ML which would've been of much less practical use,
to put it mildly.

Back to BASIC, more recently there was this book "10 PRINT". It explores
a one liner basic program which prints an endless maze. The Commodore
specific version (from some Commodore user manual) of the program is
simply this:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

That randomly picks and prints one of two specific characters, in ASCII
the closest matches would be / and \, which creates a maze.

The 10 PRINT book's available for free online at https://10print.org/.