Raspberry Pi running Spectrum Basic
10 PRINT “This is excellent news for retro-geeks.”
20 PRINT “But it is a bit of a dead end language for kids to learn.”
30 GOTO 10
One thought on “Raspberry Pi running Spectrum Basic”
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Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Why a dead end? Do you think learners should start with C++ or Visual Basic.net, or how about Cobol or Fortran that are older than Basic and still going.
I have written some useful programs in Basic (not Speccy) such as a Quiz night program, Time line (shows up to 5 concurrent lines e.g. Kings and Queens of England, Scotland, Wales England and Wales, and UK with relative spot points for any dates required – Battles, Technical and Scientific discoveries, Social events and so on). How about a graphical program to display Polar and Cartesian functions with the ability to set any x or y range unit and automatically scale the displayed graph to fit and add additional graphs for comparison. Then there are loads of demonstrations and not one program uses a dll. call. Oh and not a single line number in any of them.
Basic is a good starting point and today does not usually use line numbers, has good structure with labels as targets for subroutine calls, functions and so on.
Have you actually looked at the Spectrum Basic for the Raspberry Pi? You might find as I have, that it is some way from the original with power undreamed of 20 years ago. I am waiting for my Raspberry Pi and expect like others seem to be finding, it will fire up a renewed enthusiasm for the fun factor. After all programming is about having fun isn’t it?