19 Feb
2015
19 Feb
'15
10:19 a.m.
On 02/19/2015 09:44 AM, Fred Cisin wrote:
'course then I had to remind them an awful lot of
times that the
assignment required SAVING a source file (and it had to be the final
version, not an earlier draft) and create an executable file on their
disk, not just test run it in the IDE. I even made them print out the
relevant portion of the directory, and kicked back a lot of submissions
where the executable file and source file did not have appropriate
sequence.
My first encounter with Pascal was in the early 70s (pre
personal-computer era). It was part-and-parcel of the "structured
programming" fad that was sweeping through the profession at the time.
Of course, most took "structured programming" as meaning "GOTO-less"
and
nothing more. Others observed that "structured programming" was what
good programmers had been doing for eons. Finally, one of my co-workers
observed "show me a machine without the equivalent of a GOTO instruction".
Still, the corporate design standards group declared that this was the
way of the future and designed their own "GOTO-less" language to be
henceforth used for all utility systems programs--many of which had been
written in FORTRAN.
--Chuck