Got my first Silicon Chip mag

[Radio Fixer]

It was a PDF download which is fine.  Very Pro mag with some good articles.

One that interests me is a Basic Interpreter running on a Raspberry Pi Pico.  

Once upon a time, well 20 years ago, I was pretty good at Basic and most flavours of the Visual Basic which would make programing the micro a lot easier.

Wondered if anyone else has the article and experience with RP to offer any advice.

thanks Gary

[Mike Watterson]

The only Basic worth bothering with is Visual Studio 6 Basic. The C# is far better than VB.net, which is really just C# with Basic Wrapper. Earlier Basic than VB5 are poor. Any CP/M, Apple. Pet, DOS, and even BBC Basic are really poor, clue in name. Cut down interpreted versions of Fortran.

Better to use some decent compiler for the Pi.

[Nick]

Not sure what the issue is here with basic. If the guy knows it and just wants to do non-time-critical tasks, basic is just fine.

If you're teaching new developers or doing a complex project, they may well be more suitable languages. No reason to get upset with basic.

Simple is good: if it works for him, that's fine.

[Radio Fixer]

Well for me Nick says it right. Interest would be in being able to control a complex and versatile micro processor to do some hardware tasks using a language I have used and would I'm sure rapidly come back to me. This is how the authors of the SC article put it.

"... programming requirements for the Pico using the C or Micropython programming languages. However, programming in C is beyond most casual experimenters. Micropython is easier, but it is still a new language for most people and takes time to learn."

Chips are so cheap and the MMBasic firmware is a free download so nothing to lose.

thanks Gary