They should teach Pascal. 
YES! YES! I remember, Pascal Pointers were done with a ^, so, you could do:
var
Int: Integer;
LoopVar : Integer;
IntPtr : array[0...5] of ^Integer;
begin
for LoopVar := 0 to 5 do
begin
IntPtr[LoopVar]:=@Int;
end;
end.
Well.... unless the whole Pointer business was added by Borland in Turbo Pascal... (on the other hand, Borland Turbo Pascal pretty much was "THE" Pascal, since the only alternative was the IBM version that had... what? 7 different disks? and you had to switch between them constantly?
Heh, anyway... that's a different discussion
back to smallbasic.
I'm not really too sure; I mean, there are other languages that are powerful that are more or less "typeless" (such as, and I mention this to prevent ghostdog from hurting me
) Python, but they also at least "imply" types; you still need to know a few basic differences, such as numbers and strings and so forth. With Smallbasic (And really, I don't know the specifics, but given it's roots I am making an assumption) It's really not dynamically typed as much as it's typeless; as a learning language, it really doesn't teach important concepts, like types and scope (which it tries to pass off as advantages) Now, that being said, lacking such requirements can make it easier to learn other programming concepts, and it's certainly possible to learn them before moving onto either Visual Basic itself, or a more powerful language. (Like Pascal
heehee).
If I may be so bold, I really cannot judge something as a learning tool, just make handwavy generalizations about what I think about it; I can't really decide "what would be good for a beginner" without remembering how I learned; which was with "older" languages. At the time, VB6 was the newest language (well, for the first year and a half or so) and windows programming was all the rage and so forth, but I learned on a 286 and later a 386 Batch, QBASIC, Turbo Pascal, and a little Turbo C, and eventually upgraded to Windows programs and VB2... went straight from there to VB6 and have had that as a "home language" for quite some time. but, everybody's experience was different, for me, the most difficult part was going from the concept of "commands" in batch, to statements. It took me quite some time to understand the concept of a function. (thankfully, the use of Goto with Batch didn't crossover into any bad habits with QBASIC
. But today, if smallbasic was a first language, it is probably a lot better as a first language then batch.
