12 May
2005
12 May
'05
1:33 p.m.
On Thu, 12 May 2005 15:44:47 +0200, Allison <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net>
wrote:
Basic is a language it is difficult to code well.
...
Subject: Re: 'goto" gone from computer languages or is it!
From: "Randy McLaughlin" <cctalk at randy482.com>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 22:04:53 -0500
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Goto's can be bad if they make the code hard to follow but I find that
most
people write such sloppy code that it's hard to follow anyway as well as
making code more complicated trying to avoid goto's.
Basic is a language that is easy to code badly.
I agree with an earlier post. BASIC improperly can rot your mind,
it's bad drugs for programmers.
The danger is not so much BASIC itself as the bad habits almost everybody
got from learning it as a first language.
Your first programming language has a very profound influence on how you
think about programming, even after you become fluent in other languages.
My first programming language was Algol 60, and it was very useful for me
later on.
The problem with goto in general and BASIC in particular, is that they
encourage a view of the problem as a sequence of actions. That view may be
OK for trivial problems, but it may easily encourage a lack of analysis.
FORTH is a nice language to force people to think about the problem first
and code afterwards.
--
-bv