Vision BASIC(visionbasic.net)
visionbasic.net
Vision BASIC
https://visionbasic.net/
13 comments
If I wanted to develop games on the C64 itself, I'd use White Lightning Forth--a great compromise between expressive power and running speed. Vision Basic, requiring a 256 KiB RAM expansion, just feels weird.
In any case, kudos to the author. It's a remarkable technical achievement. I'm just ambivalent about the gray area between developing on a stock C64 and using the plentiful FOSS available on my Linux laptop.
In any case, kudos to the author. It's a remarkable technical achievement. I'm just ambivalent about the gray area between developing on a stock C64 and using the plentiful FOSS available on my Linux laptop.
Good for the C64, I remember Simon's BASIC. I remember Commodore BASIC 2.0 being primitive and the Atari 8 bitters laughing at us. The C64 needed a better BASIC and Vision BASIC is it.
Hi. looks great! Would this run on a Raspberry Pi? If so I'm quite tempted to purchase it and see how my son gets on with learning to code making games using it.
I know many of you initially read this as Visual Basic and not Vision Basic
Honestly, I don't know why the industry bothered with BASIC way back when. The old C64 should have just booted to a simple C IDE. "Hello world" is just as easy in C as it is in BASIC and much easier to do more.
Mostly because when C64 came to be no one cared about C outside Bell Labs and a couple of select universities.
Secondly, even BASIC does strings, arrays and type safety better than C.
Secondly, even BASIC does strings, arrays and type safety better than C.
C had fewer abstractions meaning that kids could develop a much better mental model of what the machine is an actually doing.
I was a 10 year kid doing BASIC, including DATA, PEEK and POKE, got into Z80 Assembly by the age of 12.
Rest assured we were more than aware of what the machine was doing.
It is an urban myth that C improves anything into that regard.
Rest assured we were more than aware of what the machine was doing.
It is an urban myth that C improves anything into that regard.
Developing a mental model of what the machine is actually doing is more advanced than just printing text to the screen, getting input, and handling basic control flow. Beginners don’t necessarily need to understand everything that the hardware is doing, and learning everything all at once is overwhelming.
I’m pretty sure you know that, too. Otherwise, why not just jump straight into assembly? There’s no better way to learn what the hardware is actually doing, right?
I’m pretty sure you know that, too. Otherwise, why not just jump straight into assembly? There’s no better way to learn what the hardware is actually doing, right?
Am I missing something, how is:
#include <stdio.h>
int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); }
just as easy as:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
Later versions of BASIC like QBasic dropped the line numbers even. BASIC won because there was no friction and no ceremony involved with writing simple programs. Displaying text, getting input from the user, and doing simple mathematical calculations were relatively intuitive. Control flow was easy with GOTO. You could learn how to do all these things in an afternoon. Most microcomputer bundled BASICS even had primitive facilities for handling graphics, sound, and joysticks, so you had all you needed to make simple games. You could even PEEK and POKE at the memory, meaning you could even do some pretty advanced programming without reaching for C, Pascal, or Assembler.
Incidentally, I believe this is why Python is so popular today. It's just a saner iteration on BASIC in many aspects.
#include <stdio.h>
int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); }
just as easy as:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
Later versions of BASIC like QBasic dropped the line numbers even. BASIC won because there was no friction and no ceremony involved with writing simple programs. Displaying text, getting input from the user, and doing simple mathematical calculations were relatively intuitive. Control flow was easy with GOTO. You could learn how to do all these things in an afternoon. Most microcomputer bundled BASICS even had primitive facilities for handling graphics, sound, and joysticks, so you had all you needed to make simple games. You could even PEEK and POKE at the memory, meaning you could even do some pretty advanced programming without reaching for C, Pascal, or Assembler.
Incidentally, I believe this is why Python is so popular today. It's just a saner iteration on BASIC in many aspects.
Loops and control structures are all much simpler to learn than grade ~6 math. Essentially, there is nothing to learn so what is the point in trying to make it easier?
Most BASIC dialects do have loops and control structures as well, but GOTO is the original control flow mechanism, it is conceptually very easy to grasp, and it is available across pretty much all BASICs. Even C has a GOTO statement, despite a certain famous computer scientist considering it to be "harmful," so Kernighan and Ritchie must have seen some value in their language having it available.
Proudly boasting about features that were standard in Acorn's BBC BASIC in 1982 and which worked on an unexpanded 6502 machine with 16kB RAM, like inline assembly.