15 Jan
1999
15 Jan
'99
5:44 p.m.
<This is definitely off-topic (who was that said I was single-minded?) but
<for a fine example of bletcherousness, try the source to the pine mailer
<(here also known as pain, or Pain In Neck Email). Find the 70K source fil
that proves any tool is a hammer. I've written good code using BASIC but
for the most part the early BASICs were weak in string and file handling
so they were not the first choice for a lot of things. Also the early
BASICs didn't have local variables and recursive routines were a PITA
as a result. Add to that most were interpreted (slow) so fast IO was out
of the question. I forced me to go to PASCAL (via UCSD p-SYSTEM) and that
was a real eye opener as I started looking at the PASCAL code and writing
assembler to look like that. C was interesting as it was efficient for
machine level things but I still find it criptic. Along the way there was
also algol, PL/M(PL/i) and some stabs at FOCAL. Forth(and PostScript) was
amoung the stack languages and I like them for some things. There were the
hybrid basic C-basic, E-basic and S-basic, they offered some fo the features
of Pcascal and C in the familiar Basic form. But when I'm working with 8085
or Z80s assembler just usually happens.
Allison