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From: wapd@houxj.UUCP (Bill Dietrich)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re:  basic for UNIX?
Message-ID: <467@houxj.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-Feb-85 11:31:41 EST
Article-I.D.: houxj.467
Posted: Wed Feb 13 11:31:41 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 14-Feb-85 02:24:13 EST
References: <7873@brl-tgr.ARPA>, <706@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 28


Why are people so intolerant of BASIC ?  Every language
has some type of usefullness for some community of users.
BASIC is useful on Unix in at least two ways that I can
think of :  it allows one to migrate software from BASIC-only
systems to the Unix-based system, and it allows a new Unix
user who doesn't know C to use a familiar language while
learning Unix.

I never use BASIC myself for anything.  But arguments that
it is worthless, inferior, outdated, etc are incorrect.
It may be totally useless to you if you know C and don't
have any software written in BASIC that you want to use.
But you are only one of the many types of computer user.
A version of BASIC that supports matrix operations may
be the best possible language in existence for a user
who needs to do lots of quick, throwaway programs that
do simple matrix operations.

The same argument holds for any other language.  Lots of
people use COBOL (which I can't stand) for good reasons :
they can't afford to rewrite all of the COBOL-based
software that they depend on, or their managers only
understand COBOL, or the government has adopted COBOL
as a standard, or some such reason.

				Bill Dietrich
				houxj!wapd