
Basic MCMC and Bayesian Statistics in BASIC - phreeza
http://sumsar.net/blog/2015/08/basic-mcmc-and-bayesian-statistics-in-basic/
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cygwin98
Just to point out: these days you don't have to use the dosbox/qbasic combo in
order to have a qbasic-compatible environment. There is an open-source
implementation called qb64 that is both qbasic compatible and cross-platform
(Windows, Linux and Mac).

Also, in qbasic, line number is optional. With SUB and FUNCTION, you can
actually do structured programming like what other programming languages such
as Pascal does.

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acqq
> All in all, it seems like I could have done pretty advanced Bayesian
> statistics using the computational tools I had access to 20 years ago! (Of
> course, one could easily have implemented a similar program in C or FORTRAN
> much much earlier…)

Turbo Pascal 3, available not later than 1986, had already much nicer syntax,
was a real compiler, had a fast IDE and the ability to draw.

QBasic appeared in 1991.

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bitwize
We snicker at BASIC today, but it was more than just a language to write toy
games in on your Commodore 64. To engineers, scientists, and other mathy
numbersy types, it was the MATLAB of the era.

