

Commodore Basic as a Scripting Language for Unix and Windows  - bdfh42
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=48

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SwellJoe
Commodore BASIC actually was my first experience with a scripting language
(and my first experience doing any programming at all a few years before).

When I was about 12, or thereabouts, I operated a BBS that ran the Color 64
BBS software, which was an assembly core with BASIC scripting. The assembly
core made it just fast enough to serve out to a 2400 baud modem, and the BASIC
scriptability made it really easy to add new games and features, and without
having to restart the whole system (BASIC with line numbers allows overwriting
of lines by using the same number...so, it's like a LISP machine...if you
squint really hard, and hit yourself in the head a few times). The fact that a
program could be _both_ BASIC and assembly was something altogether novel to
me. Of course, now I know that UNIX guys had been doing it for years, but at
the time I'd only ever seen programs written entirely in assembly or entirely
in BASIC. Never one that was a seamless combination of the two.

I still have the Color 64 manual and floppy disk. It was hand-bound and
printed on a dot matrix printer. I could never bring myself to get rid of it,
in the numerous cleanings over the past 20 years. And I think the reason is
that it taught me something that has stuck with me all these years (that one
should use the right tool for the job--not necessarily the one that is
"fastest" or most popular or the same as everything else in the toolchain).

Now that I think of it, I'm wondering if it actually extended the BASIC syntax
(making BASIC a DSL for BBS software, of sorts), or if it just did the
networking in assembly and rerouted standard IO from BASIC to the modem. If
the former, I think I owe some more props to the author of Color 64 (above and
beyond the $50 I paid for the software 20 years ago...though that _was_ when
$50 meant something...it'd be like six grand in today's dollars).

