12 May
2005
12 May
'05
9:06 a.m.
>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage
Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> writes:
Vintage> On Thu, 12 May 2005, Allison wrote:
> Basic is a language that is easy to code badly.
>
> I'm one of the few that was mostly BASIC and ASM until UCSD
> P-system and decided to learn a "structured" language. I was eye
> opening the difference coding learned. After that I tried writing
> basic using block structure and treating goto and return like Call
> and JUMP with better looking results. I can see the effect it had
> looking at some of my really old code.
Vintage> My high school compsci teacher introduced me to "structured
Vintage> programming" in BASIC, and I accepted it, but it still
Vintage> seemed to stifle my creativity.
No wonder -- structured programming in Basic is like doing carpentry
with a nail file and a brick as your only tools.
Vintage> In the second semester he
Vintage> forced me into Pascal. Let's face it: the UCSD Pascal
Vintage> system just sucks. I was willing to go along with it and
Vintage> learn Pascal until one day I put in the wrong disk during a
Vintage> proscribed disk swap and, instead of having proper error
Vintage> recovery, the OS proceeded to overwrite my disk with
Vintage> something else, losing all my source code. I swore off
Vintage> Pascal from that moment on.
I didn't realize the implementation was that bad. Unfortunate that
you mistook implementation incompetence as a reflection on the
language rather than on the implementers.
My experience was just the opposite -- started in high school with
Algol (THE system), detoured through Fortran 2, assembler, and
BASIC-PLUS, then at U of Ill took a compiler course where the prof
forced us to use his (Cornell U) PL/1 "compiler" -- an utter piece of
trash. In mid-course its defects were so obvious even to its creator
that he allowed us to switch to Pascal on the DEC-10, which was
excellent.
paul