Posted by rwap on 10/08/06 18:26

On Oct 8, 6:47 pm, mbstevens <NOXwebmast...@xmbstevensx.com> wrote:
> richard wrote:
> > Anyone ever tried writing a program using BASIC to write HTML?
> > With Liberty Basic able to function while Windows is operating, with a
> > lot more stuff than the old BASIC, I was thinking that in some cases,
> > doing so might be interesting.
> > Since HTML is basically text, one could write a program that would do
> > all the tags and attributes for you.Suggest you download a free copy of Perl, Python, or Ruby for that kind
> of thing:http://www.activestate.com/
>
> These languages are better suited for text manipulation, and have a good
> track record for creating HTML pages on the fly. You will also want a
> language with regular expressions built in or in modules.

The beauty is that there are plenty of ready made libraries for these
languages, which include HTML generation and parsing, especially for
Perl.

> Plus, Basic encourages spaghetti code. Any program of reasonable size
> becomes hard to understand. If you are an absolute beginner I suggest
> Python.

It depends on the implementation of BASIC - I recall such a program
being released for the Sinclair QL (which is still a good machine even
as an emulator!!) - at least SuperBASIC (as provided on the humble
Sinclair QL) allows you to create user defined functions and
procedures, which gets away from spaghetti code as it tends to lead to
more structured BASIC.

Rich Mellor
www.internetbusinessangels.com

[Back to original message]