The down side of Visual Basic was the cost of the program. It was quite expensive to buy and I didn't. All the things I wrote are still on my laptop and useless.
Sadly, many of the things I wrote in early versions of J stopped working in later versions. I keep hoping someday to rescue some of them. It is hard to keep up with the forum and all the exciting things people all over the planet are thinking about and writing about in wiki and other places. At the present, I'm trying to play catch up with many new ways of doing things in j701. Time is of the essence and there isn't enough it seems.... Linda -----Original Message----- From: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com [mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] On Behalf Of Linda Alvord Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 4:52 AM To: preogramm...@jsoftware.com Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork After quite a few years teaching J, I taught Basic for a semester (poorly). I struggled to consider teaching the High School course in Advanced Placement Computer Science and could make no sense of it and declined the "opportunity". I did find that several years of teaching Visual Basic at a two year community college was helpful for manipulating images and actually doing practical things. It was as close as I ever came to "real programming" as opposed to J. Linda -----Original Message----- From: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com [mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] On Behalf Of R.E. Boss Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2012 4:25 AM To: programm...@jsoftware.com Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edsgerdijk201164.html or, as I heard him say much shorter: "Basic ruins your life". R.E. Boss > -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- > Van: programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com > [mailto:programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com] Namens Boyko > Bantchev > Verzonden: zondag 2 december 2012 0:10 > Aan: programm...@jsoftware.com > Onderwerp: Re: [Jprogramming] @: and capped fork > > On 1 December 2012 16:17, Ian Clark <earthspo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > A "training wheels" form of J, tailored to people who know BASIC, > > would be so easy to write. > > Not necessarily. A BASIC thinking can be so different that hardly any > tailoring could possibly exist as a bridge to J. > > Here is a story. > > True BASIC is the modern realization of Kemeny & Kurtz's original > BASIC. The product is priced at $500. Its web site says that > 'thousands of schools, colleges, corporations, and laboratories use > True BASIC'. Like the original BASIC, True BASIC's principal target > area of application is education. > > But … there are no first-class Boolean values in this language, or > anything in their place. There are no Boolean (or equivalent) > constants. Boolean expressions can only be used as conditions in > statements like IF and DO WHILE, but they are not supposed to have > values. The outcome of Boolean expressions cannot be stored in a > variable, passed as an argument or returned from a function. > > Among other things said of this BASIC is that 'it helps … teach the > foundational principles of logic'. Yet, in the tutorials and other > teaching and learning aids one never finds problems that explicitly > involve logic. The latter is no surprise: logical calculations are a > hard thing to do without logical values. > > 'True BASIC' programmers don't even realize that not having a form of > Boolean in the language is a limitation. This is a world with almost > no common points with the expression-based world of J. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
