A close friend of mine schooled in C++, Smalltalk, Java and Groovy told me the other day that he has written his first BASIC program by using Run BASIC. He had never written code in BASIC before, but he took my word for it that BASIC is a great language for throwing together solutions quickly. He said he was struck by the lightness of the BASIC language and that he enjoyed working in it. This is my paraphrase of what he said, because I don't remember his exact words.
I know there are a lot of modern BASIC implementations that force you to declare all your variables and give them types and sizes. Some of them keep the core keywords but add Pascal syntax, and some make BASIC look more like Java. I know there are some benefits to the way these other languages work, but BASIC is really meant to be very light and simple. In my humble opinion any language claiming to be BASIC which forces the programmer to dot too many i's and cross too many t's is not BASIC, but an imposter.
BASIC is a small language without too many rules.
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