25 Oct
2012
25 Oct
'12
11:09 a.m.
>> The first program I ever wrote in BASIC was
(drumroll, please):
>>
>> 10 GOTO 10
My first program was:
10 GOSUB 10
20 END
This was on an HP 2000C Timeshared Basic System sometime in 1975-ish.
The END was there because a program wouldn't run on this system if there
wasn't an END statement. After a little while, the program halted with
an error, something about GOSUB with no RETURN, IIRC.
It's interesting to try this on various different BASICs as it does
create a situation where, if the bounds checking on the stack containing
the return statement numbers/pointers isn't good, you can cause
"interesting" things to happen. There are a few BASICs I've tried this
on where the program will actually crash BASIC.
Rick