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0 pointsSomeone6y ago0 comments

"The early interpreted BASICs did make it difficult to write good code. All source editing was line editing”

You have to see this in historical context. That Basic had an editor was a huge step forwards. That it wasn’t a full-screen editor was because full-screen editors didn’t exist yet (who wants to wait for their teletype to print 24 lines, and waste half a page of paper on it?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC#Origin:

"The first version BASIC language was released on 1 May 1964”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor#History:

"One of the earliest full-screen editors was O26, which was written for the operator console of the CDC 6000 series computers in 1967.”

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mschaef6y ago

> You have to see this in historical context. That Basic had an editor was a huge step forwards. That it wasn’t a full-screen editor was because full-screen editors didn’t exist yet

I (mistakenly!) edited out the part of my post that clarified I was thinking of microcomputer implementations (77-83 or so). Of course, full screen editing was common then, even if not necessarily in the interpreted BASICs of the time.

BASICA had a command to edit a line 'EDIT 120' that let you use an interactive line editor of sorts. (And C64 BASIC 2.0 could do something similar, I'm pretty sure). On the contrary, the contemporary Logo implementations of the time let you hit an F-key that dropped you into a full screen editor window with your source text. QB4 just started you off in the full screen editor with an immediate window (REPL, sort of) at the bottom of the screen.

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