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Basic BASIC: An introduction to computer programming in BASIC language
Basic An Introduction to Computer Programming in BASIC Language (Hayden computer programming series)
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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August 24, 2023
This book is focused almost exclusively on using BASIC to solve problems in mathematics. There’s a note in the intro to this second edition that he added a chapter on strings, which means the first edition didn’t cover strings at all; if I’m reading it right, strings were used only in PRINT statements, and only inside quotes, not in variables. This makes it less surprising that the early microcomputers didn’t bother with lower case, if text itself was an innovation.
Another interesting choice is that the first edition apparently discussed the RESTORE statement, but Coan removed it because it was “little-used”. On low-memory microcomputers, that’s not how I remember it. RESTORE was used often when determining how many items would be in an array, so as to DIM no more than necessary; and for string arrays, to specify the maximum size needed for a string (though the latter is not a feature I remember being available on the TRS-80 Model I).
Yet another interesting historical tidbit that I’d heard just recently and didn’t quite believe is that early on people often used slashes to denote the letter ‘o’ instead of the number ‘0’. By the time I started using computers in 1980, the slashed zero was ubiquitous if not universal. Here, Coan uses the slashed letter, making it very strange reading G0T0 and other statements with Os in them. It’s hard to get used to, both because of a life spent translating the slash to a number, and because the main text uses the standard letter, requiring going back and forth often.
And in The Little Book of Basic Style I noted that they seemed to have very limited variable names; here, Coan explicitly says that variable names can be either one letter; or one letter plus one number. And some versions of BASIC saw less need for string arrays, and used array notation to access substrings of a string.
In the first appendix, he goes over how to type your program in offline using paper tape so as not to waste time at the live terminals—time at the terminal was precious. This is reflected throughout the text, I think, in the tendency to use FOR… NEXT to make tables of possible solutions instead of focusing on the specific solution at hand. For example, the program to solve the “birthday problem”, that is, what is the chance among x people, that two or more will share the same birthday?, outputs a table of numbers of people and then the probability.
I learned two very useful things from this book, as well. One is the usefulness of the MAT functions for polynomials—and how often polynomials turn up in mathematical problem-solving. Even more amazing, though, is that I don’t remember ever learning how useful factorials are in probability. It’s possible I’ve forgotten it, but my recollection is that factorials have always been presented as this sort of weird operator that can very quickly overwhelm your computer’s number storage and not as a useful operator for answering probability questions.
He also very clearly, more clearly than I’ve seen it in any textbook on probability, describes enumeration, permutations, combinations, and partitioning. It may be that having to write in such a way that a human can understand it enough to describe it to a computer requires clarity.
Another interesting choice is that the first edition apparently discussed the RESTORE statement, but Coan removed it because it was “little-used”. On low-memory microcomputers, that’s not how I remember it. RESTORE was used often when determining how many items would be in an array, so as to DIM no more than necessary; and for string arrays, to specify the maximum size needed for a string (though the latter is not a feature I remember being available on the TRS-80 Model I).
Yet another interesting historical tidbit that I’d heard just recently and didn’t quite believe is that early on people often used slashes to denote the letter ‘o’ instead of the number ‘0’. By the time I started using computers in 1980, the slashed zero was ubiquitous if not universal. Here, Coan uses the slashed letter, making it very strange reading G0T0 and other statements with Os in them. It’s hard to get used to, both because of a life spent translating the slash to a number, and because the main text uses the standard letter, requiring going back and forth often.
And in The Little Book of Basic Style I noted that they seemed to have very limited variable names; here, Coan explicitly says that variable names can be either one letter; or one letter plus one number. And some versions of BASIC saw less need for string arrays, and used array notation to access substrings of a string.
In the first appendix, he goes over how to type your program in offline using paper tape so as not to waste time at the live terminals—time at the terminal was precious. This is reflected throughout the text, I think, in the tendency to use FOR… NEXT to make tables of possible solutions instead of focusing on the specific solution at hand. For example, the program to solve the “birthday problem”, that is, what is the chance among x people, that two or more will share the same birthday?, outputs a table of numbers of people and then the probability.
I learned two very useful things from this book, as well. One is the usefulness of the MAT functions for polynomials—and how often polynomials turn up in mathematical problem-solving. Even more amazing, though, is that I don’t remember ever learning how useful factorials are in probability. It’s possible I’ve forgotten it, but my recollection is that factorials have always been presented as this sort of weird operator that can very quickly overwhelm your computer’s number storage and not as a useful operator for answering probability questions.
He also very clearly, more clearly than I’ve seen it in any textbook on probability, describes enumeration, permutations, combinations, and partitioning. It may be that having to write in such a way that a human can understand it enough to describe it to a computer requires clarity.
Displaying 1 of 1 review