19 Aug
2001
19 Aug
'01
9:16 a.m.
On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Jeff Hellige wrote:
While I agree that BASIC is a good starting point to
get into
programming, I think that BASIC itself is a lot more powerful than
Why not just start out with Modula-2? Of course, Forth, Perl, C, VAX
Macro, etc. could all be learned by beginners if they had good
instructors to teach them - or, if they were intelligent enough to
read a few books on their own. On can have a bad instructor who can
make BASIC or FORTRAN seem difficult.
most people give it credit. I've written any
number of database
BASIC is also a lot more annoying than a lot of people give it credit
for being. Have you ever had to convert lengthy code written in
non-structured BASIC, that has all two-digit character names, multiple
statements per line, gotos and gosubs all over the place - many of
which go no where after earlier code changes, etc.? It's a nuisance
to maintain and work with. Repeat after me: "BASIC sucks more than
rap music."
applications in compiled PowerBasic over the years,
some of them
fully able to read/write dBase III format files. One of them was a
Aaaccck. I had to work at a place with something like that - no dount
a result of very bad karma. Further proof that it was very bad karma
is the fact that they were using UNIBASIC on a PC running SCO
OpenServer (bletch!), and didn't understand why SCO's flavors of UNIX
are broken, which, of course, also explains why they also liked
Microsoft and were considering installing some sort of Foxpro for for
SCO. (double bletch!) They created occasional "custom reports" by
having someone using a PC running Windoze download the .dbf files and
use Foxpro on that to creat the reports. (tripple bletch!) Of course,
I engineered a solution using Perl, Solaris, Oracle, Apache, etc. that
simplified everything. :-) :-) :-)
Database programming in BASIC is a pain, and it leads to all sorts of
bad habits, like an insistence on continuing to do database
programming in BASIC instead of converting those DBF files into data
useable by a real, and useful, databases like PostgreSQL or Oracle.
Is not the problem that too many people have uses BASIC for
applications that should have been written in COBOL? ;-)
modular inventory/sales type program that comprised of
nearly a dozen
seperate programs that were only called when needed. The whole
application took up less than 1meg of disk space and was replaced by
a similar program written in FoxPro that took up nearly 10 times the
Aye, FoxPro, the database software of choice for clueless luzers. ;-)
disk space and lacked in quite a few areas that the
original program
was able to handle. I wrote my own functions for sorting and file
handling and such based on the demands of each individual application.
Still, just think how much more flexibility you'd have gained with a
useful database like PostgreSQL or Oracle... even using COBOL would
have been a cleaner solution.
Just my 2-cents worth.
--
Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals:
All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
rdd(a)rddavis.net 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such
http://www.rddavis.net beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.