Ok: The Resurrection of GW-BASIC
Book details
Summary
Description
GW-BASIC isn't dead yet.A Microsoft product of the early 1980s, GW-BASIC and its direct successors were loaded into more personal computers than any other programming language in history. GW-BASIC was a line-numbered, unstructured, loosely procedural high-level programming environment that immediately set you down in the thick of it: confronted with an Ok prompt, cursor blinking, the language interpreter made no bones about its high-level expectations of you. Algorithms, some just as complex as anything being coded these days, could be fashioned in GW-BASIC; program in the language now, and you'll experience a particular type of joy that attends to a successful solution of a new-world coding problem that, samurai-like, you are somehow able to slay using an old-world unstructured language.Mark Jones Lorenzo first wrote about GW-BASIC in "Not Ok," arguing that reports of its death were greatly exaggerated--and proving it by offering a cookbook of engaging and cutting-edge algorithmic type-in recipes, earmarked for immediate consumption. And now it's time for a second helping. If "Not Ok" was the appetizer, then "Ok" is the main course, containing delicious recipes for even more complex programs that stretch GW-BASIC to its absolute limits while satiating the most discriminating programmers. Inside these pages you'll find the ingredients for cooking up Turing machines, the Game of Life, tic-tac-toe, the card game baccarat, a slider puzzle, an analog clock, permutation and combination generators, a slot machine, the Tower of Hanoi, an "outguessing machine," a decimal-to-fraction converter, a statistical bootstrapping routine, and several recursive algorithms, among many other programs--including playable versions of a handful of classic arcade games of a bygone era.In addition, GW-BASIC goes head-to-head with an object-oriented programming language that's more than just another flavor of the month: Java. Will the ragtag GW-BASIC hold its own against the unalloyed Goliath-like forces of modernity? Or will it finally succumb to the ravages of time (and a leviathan language), revealing itself to be well past its expiration date? The fate of GW-BASIC lies in your hands.* GW-BASIC is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation, which did not in any way endorse or assist in the production of this product.
We would LOVE it if you could help us and other readers by reviewing the book