rdgreenwood wrote:
Phew! I was afraid you were going to include Enjoying BASIC, a book I wrote for Harper & Rowe. The publisher predicted sales of 200,000 copies; within a month of releasing it, Pascal came along and the BASIC market went bye-bye. We sold fewer than 20,000.
I did a lot of Apple ][ programing (as well as other platforms) in the 80s and I detested Pascal because it had no direct interaction with the machine. If you wanted to access memory you had to create a file then read or write it, no peek and poke there. If you consider most of my programs were written as machine code hidden in REM statements with control in BASIC you'll understand why I didn't like Pascal. The first line of code erased the entire program if you listed it as a form of copy protection. When I had my choice I used Promal which was a C-like language which allowed direct program interaction with screen memory.