To those (mainly C people) who thumb their nose at BASIC, let's
set the record straight. The days of line numbers, spaghetti code and
BASIC interpreters ended 15 to 20 years ago. Where have you been.
Microsoft QuickBasic and Borland TurboBasic were full and efficient DOS
compilers in the mid 80's. Now, there are many more and better BASIC
compilers for DOS and 16/32 bit WIN. Sorry, I don't know about Linux.
My favorite is PowerBasic (www.powerbasic.com). Modern BASIC is
modular, structured, with pointers and type checking and with every kind
of built in function that just about anyone would need. I program PC's
to do industrial control and run test equipment. Heavy duty math is a
breeze. So is file manipulation and database work. PowerBasic
generates fast, tight code (as good as most C compilers) and has a built
in assembler if you need to be tighter and faster. Also, there are tons
of user contributed BASIC code snippets on the web.
