Dr. Brin,
It's really much simpler than that. I am a Mac user who reluctantly bought an XP/Vaio horror in order to run games and some other things for the kids.
I understand: as a dedicated Mac user since '86 (only my innate cheapness kept me from jumping in in '84), a seven-year Apple employee, and the radical freak who managed to con my management into letting me have a Mac on my desk at both HP and Sun, I eventually broke down and bought a no-name peecee that runs WinXP so I could more easily work in a win-centric environment.
For the Mac, there's the fine and free Chipmunk BASIC, which is a real old-fashioned BASIC interpreter that has been around for years and is available for OS X and prior versions (one of the things I continue to admire about the Mac world is that old programs for old OS's seem to stick around longer than "over there."
I know that I must put up with Windows and our next machine will probably be another of the WinHorrors. But please don't blame me.
This group? Blame? Perish the thought.
Yes, but I need turn-key usability for programs/games my kids bring home.
And plenty of games just don't exist for Linux or Mac. My son is addicted to Hot Wheels, and all of their games (including planethotwheels.com, which is very near the top of his favorite things to do) require windows.
But since you (admittedly under duress) have been infected with the virus from Redmond, you might want to check out the following site, which lists *many* compilers and interpreters for BASIC:
http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/basic.html
Finally, recognizing that you already know BASIC and
want to be able to use that knowledge, please allow me
to flog Java a little (as the former publisher of
java.sun.com)... There is a very fine Java learning
environment called BlueJ (www.bluej.org) with a great
book to go with it ("Objects First with Java: A
Practical Introduction using BlueJ"). The BlueJ IDE
was developed explicitly to support learning Java by
starting with its characteristic object orientation,
rather than by starting out by teaching you how to
type twenty or thirty lines of indecipherable
gibberish in order to make the words "Hello, World!"
appear on the screen.Thanks,
Dave
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