Python's biggest compromises

Andrew Dalke adalke at mindspring.com
Sun Aug 3 14:32:29 EDT 2003


Dennis Lee Bieber:
>         Unless I'm mistaken, the folks behind TrueBASIC /were/ Kemeny and
> Kurtz (spellings)... IE, the creators of the original BASIC. <G>

Yup.  From truebasic.com
] John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964
] for use at Dartmouth College. They made it freely available to
] everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers. It
] soon became a world standard.
]
] In 1983 they created True BASIC to incorporate and showcase
] all the advanced developments they had added to their language,
] and offered it as a commercial product.

But that doesn't implement the original BASIC language.  OTOH,
it does say it can convert older BASIC to TrueBASIC, so there
is still backwards compatibility.  That's gotta warm someone's heart
knowing code written back in the 1960s on a teletype machine
will still run today.. and even on a handheld.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com






More information about the Python-list mailing list