drogon wrote:
EhBASIC is an annotated and enhanced version of a disassembly of Microsoft Basic.
That is very interesting actually, I've only skimmed the pages on EhBASIC and wasn't aware of this fact. This does make it's inclusion in my program a bit easier to swallow.
drogon wrote:
I'd go ahead and sell your thing - If anyone is going to come after you, it's Microsoft, but be aware that putting BASIC in education in these enlightened days may not go down well - you're up against some very big players pushing scratch, python, and others on other small computer systems and desktop PCs and tablets. Every high school kid in Scotland gets an iPad for example...
I feel the only reason Microsoft would try to come after me for this inclusion, is firstly, if they are even aware of what EhBASIC even is, as I wasn't even aware that it was a sly disassembly of MS BASIC, which is some fun history in itself. I am also quite aware that BASIC is the language I grew up with to learn programming, however, the focus on this product isn't BASIC, I am including it more or less literally for "educational purposes", a historic element to understand how these old BASICs worked at a low-level to understand how a computer processes and handles data at it's lowest level most users of modern CPUs could never easily see. The main highlight of this product is the ability to easily see how memory is organized, potentially optimized, and just learning how a CPU works at this low-level. The program I am developing focuses more of the C programming language, and includes a working cc65 C library for the simulator allowing people to get their hands dirty with a language that can be a bit more complicated to experiment with on real hardware, as it's not that easy to fully understand C at first, and how various memory-based exploits are done, and how the stack works among other interest C concepts. If you recall trying to learn C, I'm sure you ran into many crashes, and in the older days, those crashes sometimes meant having to reboot the entire computer as there was no memory protection back then.
So, I'll include for "historic educational purposes", and if Microsoft thinks they need to get their lawyers on it, then I can easily remove it from the product without any negative side-effects.
I do kind of want to start a new topic now discussing what people think of modern people learning programming through languages such as Python, Scratch, Ruby, among other languages. Guess Java is now out the door in schools these days? With languages like those mentions, a lot of computer science concepts are just lost, like who is going to code the next native program if all new programmers only use Python and Scratch, and have never touched a compiler? Are these types of programmers destined to be replaced by AI first as the industry will lack those able to grasp how a compiled language works? Languages like Python, Scratch, among others have so many safety nets to otherwise protect the coder from themselves. But I digress, this should be in another topic not here.
Regardless, thank you very much for the reply, this helps a lot in deciding to include it in the program or not.