David (Behan) do you use VBscript with ASP pages?

I've been going over VBscript and I can't fathom why the language was designed as it was.
Why does it have to be so verbose? "dim","sub","end if". I don't know why they had to rewrite the book on how to declare functions, and why not use good old braces?

Also, the worst thing I believe is that they use single quotes ' for comments! How ridiculous!

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asp is different from php by those things mentioned by you above.
they do make sense outlined below
dim in asp is setting a variable in php $str=NULL; or a value otherwise you get a php error

sub is similar with functions
end if is equal to closing } bracket.
It makes sense.
Now in asp you don't have to close every line with ; where in php you get an error if you don't.

I thing those things makes the 2 languages different.
The principles are the same.

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I understand the language perfectly, and what their purpose is.
What I'm questioning is the actual theory behind using these things as opposed to more standard language conventions.

Why shoud you need to use dim if you are not type-setting?
It makes sense in C/C++ to use because you are initialising the variable with a type, but with dim it's simply a redundant keyword.

As for using the single-quote as a comment I don't know why a language designer would go against all standard language conventions and choose that.

They are trying to be different and make the two of them distinct in their own way.

I've seen more subtle hijackings in The Middle East to be honest.

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Thanks for moving the thread, whoever did. For the record it's not a PHP vs ASP question, I was having a look into ASP(VBscript) to see about learning another web language but some of the design choices seem counter-intuitive.
Not just compared to PHP, but compared to C/C++/Javascript etc.

I moved it.
About the name was the first thing that came into my mind.

It wasn't designed as such AFAIK. It just evolved.

First there was BASIC [God bless it!]. Then Microsft produced their own version - QBasic which was included in DOS. That became Quick Basic which was a standalone product. That in turn became Visual Basic, when Windows became more widespread.

Microsoft then modified Visual Basic to run as the programming language for Office, and it became known as VBasic.

This in turn was modified into VBscript for use as a serverside language,

Hence, you will find a LOT of old BASICy things in the language.

There again, I might be wrong!

Anyone still able to program in BASIC?

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I use ASP as I needed to learn it in my first job with an e-learning company. Even though I know PHP is better and more versatile, I can't quite bring myself to learn it for the want to learn something a little more powerful like Ruby on Rails or Java. Mind you, I haven't made much of a dent in either of them.

I'm looking to expand into another language. PHP is great and because it's almost universally supported there's no problem pitching a project in PHP.
However, I'd still like to have JSP or ASP or the like for "corporate" jobs.

Python seems to be on the up at the moment. Despite its unconventional style, the lack of braces does actually improve readability.

PHP is very easy to use though, it's very easy to pick up if you had to modify a script or add to it etc.