In the 8-bit age a lot of computer science educators were unhappy with BASIC being the lingua franca for beginning programmers.
People frequently complained about GOTO in BASIC, but the really weak part was GOSUB which kept a "return address" on the stack but didn't support parameters or local variables.
There were a few competitive language cultures but they all had a big disadvantage relative to BASIC which was that BASIC could fit into a machine with 4k of RAM and did well on machines like the TRS-80 Model I not to mention the old PDP-8.
Pascal was popular among those who liked static typed languages, it was a bear to compile code for it for machines like the 6502 with limited registers and addressing modes.
Logo was popular among those who liked Lisp (MIT) and had graphical capabilities that were really engaging.
FORTH wasn't considered good for education but ambitious programmers found it a step between BASIC and assembly and it used the stack in a clever way which made it look like Lisp flipped backwards, complete with compile and run time modes that made it possible to write your own control structures.
By '83 or so even cheap machines could fill out the whole 64k and you would have had more choices than BASIC (I had C on my TRS-80 Color Computer!) but BASIC was pretty entrenched by then. Certainly you could have gotten Lisp to run on the 6502.
pjmlp•7mo ago
Note that the BASIC that could fit into 4K of RAM was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC, hence why many learnt BASIC as an interpreted language, while the original one always compiled to machine code before execution, in a kind of primitive JIT compiler.
Lisp and Pascal versions suffered from the same issue with subsetting language and runtime features.
PaulHoule•7mo ago
In a lot of cases it only supported integer math, one of the selling points of Microsoft BASIC was that it supported floats. Notably Wozniak's Integer BASIC
wasn't considered good enough for education because it could only count to 32,767, there was the same problem with Level I BASIC for the TRS-80 Model I
PaulHoule•7mo ago
People frequently complained about GOTO in BASIC, but the really weak part was GOSUB which kept a "return address" on the stack but didn't support parameters or local variables.
There were a few competitive language cultures but they all had a big disadvantage relative to BASIC which was that BASIC could fit into a machine with 4k of RAM and did well on machines like the TRS-80 Model I not to mention the old PDP-8.
Pascal was popular among those who liked static typed languages, it was a bear to compile code for it for machines like the 6502 with limited registers and addressing modes.
Logo was popular among those who liked Lisp (MIT) and had graphical capabilities that were really engaging.
FORTH wasn't considered good for education but ambitious programmers found it a step between BASIC and assembly and it used the stack in a clever way which made it look like Lisp flipped backwards, complete with compile and run time modes that made it possible to write your own control structures.
By '83 or so even cheap machines could fill out the whole 64k and you would have had more choices than BASIC (I had C on my TRS-80 Color Computer!) but BASIC was pretty entrenched by then. Certainly you could have gotten Lisp to run on the 6502.
pjmlp•7mo ago
Lisp and Pascal versions suffered from the same issue with subsetting language and runtime features.
PaulHoule•7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_BASIC
wasn't considered good enough for education because it could only count to 32,767, there was the same problem with Level I BASIC for the TRS-80 Model I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_I_BASIC