ScriptBasic Embedding

[John Spikowski]

*** deleted ***

[Petr Schreiber]

Microsoft uses VB in their documentation of their other language offerings to show how things work.


Hi John,

do you have any example of this happening? Would be nice to see, but I do not remember this to be the case for long time, maybe back in 90's.

From my experience Microsoft in particular shows the technique in all their languages, side by side. For example here, C#, C++ and VB code in the Examples:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6sh2ey19.aspx#Y10061



The idea is that everyone understands Basic

Maybe depends on the country, from what I have seen in my life, even people not programming start to laugh by default when hearing about BASIC, because "they heard it is lame/not for serious apps". With this "opinion", I think most people do not even consider trying BASIC, therefore their experience with its syntax is not very common. I recently read an article where BASIC was considered harmful, because people writing in it forgot to write semicolons in other languages. What an ... argument :p.

I am not native speaker, so I am not sure I understand your last sentence, could you explain it more :oops:.


Thanks,
Petr

[Petr Schreiber]

I agree the "English feel" side of the BASIC language is something which attracted me a lot when I was young and decided which language to pick. But lately, it seems the OOP model as a such gives similar service in almost any language.
I think that is one of the reasons I feel strong BASIC "spirit" from C# language for example.

Little illustration:


sText = File.ReadAllText("c:\temp\myCharacters.txt");
sText = sText.ToLower();


If there would not be that semicolon on the end, it very much resembles some of the BASICs - no ugly characters, the stream of "commands" flows similar to english language as in BASIC.

I think the transition to higher level languages, increased performance of PCs, bigger hard drives and code completion mechanics smoothed the borders between languages a lot. Obscure strcpy and similar few characters "magic words" commands (not speaking of assembly) are now substitued by more english like function/method names in many languages.

Sometimes, BASIC takes it too far with being English like. For example, I was never big fan of:

Local myValue As Number
syntax, because I think the:


Number myValue

... is still "human language compatible" and much shorter (similar to "things I should buy" list of items I use when I go to shop).

ThinBASIC and many other newer BASICs offer this alternative syntax. Often being criticised by "BASIC hardcore guys", but I think these people forgot the purpose and focus too much on form they are used to.


Petr

[kryton9]

We are all getting old. The current generation of young kids when I mention programming ask about in this order: html and xml. :)

[ErosOlmi]

We are all getting old. The current generation of young kids when I mention programming ask about in this order: html and xml. :)

They ask what they know now or what their teachers are able to teach them at that age.

But with such tools they will get problems as soon as the project will grow or will become more complex.
At that point they will ask something different.

[ErosOlmi]

Here in Italy: Java, .Net, C++