basic

[Jerry McAllister]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 01:59:41PM -0700, Charlie Kester wrote:

> On Wed 06 May 2009 at 13:15:34 PDT Fred C wrote:
> >
> >On May 6, 2009, at 12:48 PM, Gary Gatten wrote:
> >
> >>LMAO!  Touché!  Seriously though, can't we all just get along? :)
> >
> >
> >I have no problem with linux I am using it every day at work it is  
> >installed on more than 2000 servers. But with all the incoherences in
> >the tools and the os, I feel sometime like I am working on Windows.
> 
> I suspect the OP was trolling.  The giveaway is his suggestion that
> following his advice would make FreeBSD a "best seller".  This reflects
> a complete lack of awareness of what FreeBSD is all about.
> 
> Setting aside the fact that FreeBSD is not a commercial product and thus
> has nothing to sell, he also presumes that our primary goal is to
> increase the size of our userbase and that we are willing to make
> whatever accommodations are necessary to achieve that goal.
> 
> But unless I'm mistaken, that isn't FreeBSD's goal.
> 
> FreeBSD's goal is to provide a freely-available implementation of BSD
> Unix for the most common hardware.   New users who are looking for a BSD
> Unix are welcome, but they are expected to adapt to FreeBSD's way of
> doing things and not vice versa.  The current userbase is large enough
> to suggest that many people have no problem with those terms.
> 
> As for the suggestion that what FreeBSD needs is VB, there have already
> been various ports of Basic over the years.  None of them seem to have
> had much success.  BSD users seem to be content with traditional shell
> scripting, perl, or newer scripting languages like python -- all of
> which better reflect the Unix philosophy than VB does.  

The only thing I miss about basic was the ease of playing the speaker
on a pc.  I wrote a number of odd-scaled and timed loops in Basic many 
years ago - circa 1980, pre Visual Basic actually, as tests of the effects 
of tone intervals and tone spacing and wouldn't mind resurecting them and 
doing some more experimenting.   

I know there are all kinds of more sophisticated things available, but the 
simplicity of it then just suited what I was trying to do.  It would be 
easy enough to rewrite the loops in something like Perl, but is it as easy 
to make the tones and control the time intervals?   I don't remember seeing 
that other places.  

Otherwise, the only other reason for Basic nowdays, as far as I can see, 
is for nostalgia -- anyone remember PP coding on CDC 6000 and 170 series 
mainframes?  Now that's nostalgia.

////jerry


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