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Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?

92 points · 53 comments · Gorsefound

  1. pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
    Xojo, Mikroe BASIC, VBA, and VB.NET are still around even if they don't make HN headlines.
    1. JdeBP · · focus · HN ↗
      The interesting thing would be if someone made a lookalike for Visual BASIC for DOS (not Windows) that ran as a standalone EFI application.

      That is the real 'what if it had not gone out of fashion' path. VB/DOS definitely went out of fashion. GUI BASICs became fashionable, instead. Everyone who does a 'visual' BASIC nowadays does a GUI one.

      The headlined BASIC is nothing like a VB/DOS for EFI, though.

      1. pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
        I would argue that the BASIC variants in 8 bit home computers were already GUI BASIC, given their capabilities and underlying hardware.

        That wasn't the case with GW-BASIC, due to how MS-DOS came to be.

        However the idea of an EFI BASIC does sound rather nice, assuming the whole plethora of graphics programming as well.

        Other take the easy way out with RISC OS for the Raspberry PI, which has BASIC as main programming language alongside Assembly.

        1. JdeBP · · focus · HN ↗
          Oh yes. They were definitely graphical. No two ways about that.

          I'm talking more about the distinction between VB/DOS and VB/Windows. They both did the whole WIMP thing, with a visual editor to construct the forms for one's programs, but VB/DOS used a TUI rendering that drew everything with VGA character graphics and used the firmware low-level keyboard access for input; whereas of course VB/Windows used the Windows GUI.

          A VB/DOS-alike that ran on EFI and did the whole form-based programming thing, would use the EFI text input and output protocols, which know Unicode, waiting for events, and standardized scan codes and modifiers.

          There is no major call for it, as you say, when bootstrapping an entire operating system is so easy. But it would be interesting to see someone tackle it from the point of view of what VB/DOS would look like today if it ran directly on the firmware, spoke Unicode, and ran in protected mode

          1. pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
            Ah sure, that could be interesting, given the ongoing nostalgia for TUI interfaces.

            A Phoenix like BIOS UI.

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