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George,

Here's another bite on the relay of your request:

>> My favourite version of Basic was the old QuickBasic as supplied with
>> PC's, years ago
>
> It's still around at various places, if he would like to stick with
> it...
> 
> (I have no idea about the legality of downloading QB4.5 from there)

As others have pointed out here, there are a number of choices.  The
higher level math programs such as Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, etc, are
easy to graph in and easy to calculate in, and there's abundant
documentation.  A plain old spreadsheet like Excel is also very easy to
calculate and graph in; the main problem with Excel is that the
formulas can be difficult to understand if there's a problem a long
time after you've coded something.  But it's easy to learn and quick to
code.  Excel is also a bit limited in the size of arrays that can be
used, although I don't expect you'd run into those limits. There are
educational prices on all these packages you would probably have access
to from your old job.

Basic, Fortran & C, which are known as higher-level languages, often
don't have very good graphics support and take a long time to code.
It's possible to buy graphics add ons for them, but they can be
expensive, or were 15 years ago!  One routine I had that took up maybe
1000 lines of Fortran, including graphics that I programmed myself, I
executed in Matlab or similar with ten lines of code, including calls
to the built-in graphics routines.  The equations in the Matlab-like
program looked pretty much identical to how one would write them using
pen and paper.

I don't know about Java; one drawback is that I believe it's object
oriented, which can take some getting used to.  But it would be easy to
implement on the web, as Frank has pointed out.  I expect it would be
much more similar to Basic or Fortran in code length than to Matlab or
similar.

Programming languages are still needed when routines take too long to
execute in the fancier packages like Matlab.  However, modern computers
are so fast that one rarely encounters such limits.  Any of your
routines that might take a minute or two on the Casio will probably
execute in microseconds on your new computer, perhaps even in Matlab.
It's nice to have the backup of a programming language.  Basic might be
a good choice there.  If you run into long execution times, you can
always port the routine to Fortran

   

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