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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the most ideal application for software preservation, it just so happens that many magazines with type in code have been archived.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.

in reply to vidak

Lisp obviously. We can still run code from 63 years ago without change.
in reply to 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