Vision BASIC

by nickt • 3 years ago

27 13 3 years ago

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.

mikelnrd• 3 years ago

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.

lproven• 3 years ago

Sounds like a project from someone who never saw non-American 8-bits and non-American BASIC dialects, TBH.

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.

osigurdson3• 3 years ago

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.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

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.

osigurdson3• 3 years ago

C had fewer abstractions meaning that kids could develop a much better mental model of what the machine is an actually doing.

lockhouse2• 3 years ago

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.

osigurdson3• 3 years ago

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?

djitz• 3 years ago

I know many of you initially read this as Visual Basic and not Vision Basic

fernirello• 3 years ago

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.

Vision BASIC

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