Hetz, I believe you were a bit rude in your post. OK: here is a small
coverage of the various languages used in Linux and their role.
Basic is not used very much in Linux. Most serious hackers will not use
code that was written in it, or generally touch it. If you still want to
use Basic, you might be able to survive with GNOME Basic, or KBasic or
whatever, but nobody recommends one to use them.
The real "Basic" in Linux is called Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl/insert your
language of choice here. Most of the scripting languages available on
Linux are available on Windows too. Of all the languages I'm familiar
with, Perl resembles Basic the most and I believe people who are
GW-Basic/VBA Programmers at heart will usually fall in love with Perl.[1]
Perl (Python/Ruby - yeah, yeah - let's not start a language war) has
everything Basic has and much more. In fact many C programs, even such
that makes use of very low-level system calls, can be translated into Perl
with great ease, while yielding an even smaller codebase. It is a common
idiom that one can do in Perl in one line, what would take dozens of lines
in a portable C.
Like I said, Perl is available on Windows, MacOS X, etc. Due to the
differences in the philosophy (CRs and their ilk) of those OSes, one will
have to know what he's doing so it will be a "write-once run everywhere"
program. Still, it's usually easier to write a portable program in Perl
than in C.
I suggest Basic people to start with perl. If something annoys them about
it, they can switch to a different language, once they mastered regexps,
nested data-structures, sockets, etc.
Then there's the C/C++ language, which is what almost everything is
written in: the kernel, the standard library, the C compiler itself,
X-Window, the shell, or the scripting languages' interpreters for that
matter. C/C++ code is relatively portable across UNIXes (again - if you
know what you're doing), runs much faster than Perl in many cases, but is
usually harder and takes more time to write. Therefore, I would recommend
doing most of the day-to-day work in Perl (and in shell, which is also
recommended to learn) and use C only for cases where there are lots of
calculations, loops and other things which are not very perl friendly.
There are many languages which I did not cover here. I did not include
them here because they are encountered less often on UNIX systems in
general.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - My mother computer languages is GW-Basic. After which I studies C
and VBA. Perl was the fourth language I learnt.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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