Been thinking about software preservation.
BASIC is not really the most ideal application for software preservation, it just so happens that many magazines with type in code have been archived.
I wonder what a software preservation language would require.
The people on the retro computing forum seem to think it would be a very simple to implement virtual machine.
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@vidak You still need something you can write & ship applications in, and BASIC is very terse compared to most languages. A similar program is often half the length of a (more readable) Python or C program.
A VM doesn't help anyone but language implementers.
The down side of BASIC is every dialect is different & opinionated. Maybe that's good, diversity is immunity to viruses & AI slop.
#basic
@vidak I would like Pascal to be more prominent, but as previously noted,
A) the semicolon/period rules are baffling,
and B) the impl-specific libraries are even more divergent.
@vidak Lisp obviously. We can still run code from 63 years ago without change.