On Monday, March 3, 2003, at 11:54 am, Jose J. Ortiz-Carlo wrote:
And speaking of languages, is it me, or is BASIC making a comeback of sorts?
It made a 'comeback' a decade or so back with Micro$oft's Visual Basic and VB for Applications, which are among the most widely used languages in the world. Not to mention VB.NET and VBScript.
Some of my alumni are starting to report this back from the States. One of them is doing an engineering major in Florida, and his first programming class is in BASIC. He's supposed to follow it up with FORTRAN.
I shared an office with a PhD student who was using VB for a heat and mass transfer simulation (wouldn't have been my choice!).
Out of curiosity, I did a websearch for QBASIC, and I was amazed at the amount of hits I got. All current, mind you. It seems it's popular enough to inspire a "QBASIC for Dummies".
As a result of my research, I started teaching BASIC again. Nothing like BASIC to turn aspiring computer users into programming, trust me.
Well, there is BASIC, and then there is VB/VBA (which is object based), and there is REALbasic (which is object oriented and has exceptions, threads, interfaces, references and operator overloading). I think the 'basic' part of the name in VB and RB is more about sounding unscary to non-CS graduates than about indicating language family trees wrt to syntax and such.
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
Misuse of IMPs leads to strange, difficult-to-diagnose bugs. - Anguish et al. "Cocoa Programming"
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