16 Aug
2001
16 Aug
'01
11:27 p.m.
Various people wrote:
CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instructional
Language),
Ha ha, I'd forgotten about that one... I remember typing in a CESIL
interpreter into the Speccy from some magazine or other. It
was even slower than ZX BASIC though so I gave up on it after a couple
of weeks..
If the eight-bitters had booted into Pascal, perhaps
things would have
looked differently?
For me the immediacy of an interpreted language was what made it fun, and
therefore encouraged me to find out more about programming.
We were taught PASCAL and 6809 assembly in my first year at college, both
excellent learning languages (one for high-level structured programming and
the other for the low-level 'how a computer computes' stuff) - both were
nowhere near as much fun as BASIC because you had to compile/assemble them
before you could "do anything". A lot of the time was spent learning the
language syntax ("why does it need a semicolon here" or "why does the
opcode
need to go at least one space in") rather than learning programming
concepts, which I found a bit distracting. OK nowadays it's not a big deal
to pick up a new language, but when I was just starting out learning
non-intuitive rules about semicolons was quite a headache.
Compare the possible pitfalls in here (what are INPUT, OUTPUT? why no
semicolon after BEGIN and WHILE (TRUE)? why a full stop after the last END?
what does 'while true' really mean anyway? etc)
PROGRAM SayHello(INPUT, OUTPUT)
BEGIN
WHILE (TRUE)
BEGIN
WRITELN('Hello World');
END;
END.
when compared to this:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
BASIC's appeal was its simplicity and immediacy. I don't agree with Wirth
that it pollutes the mind irrevocably either, I mostly use C++ or Java these
days and never have to use the much-maligned 'goto'. The only time I use
global data is for the occasional acceptable (even trendy!) "singleton"
design pattern :-)
--al
PS I guess my mind has been polluted though, I'd rather hack 68K any day ;-)
7:41 a.m.
On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Alan Pearson wrote:
the much-maligned 'goto'.
Fooey! Goto is not intrinsically bad. It's like nuclear fission; it can
do some really cool things and some really bad things, all depending on
the wielder. I frequently find C's goto useful for concentrating
error-handling code in a block at the end of a function.
--
Jeffrey S. Sharp
jss(a)subatomix.com
8:15 a.m.
On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Alan Pearson wrote:
We were taught PASCAL and 6809 assembly in my first
year at college, both
[...]
Compare the possible pitfalls in here (what are INPUT,
OUTPUT? why no
semicolon after BEGIN and WHILE (TRUE)? why a full stop after the last END?
what does 'while true' really mean anyway? etc)
It never made sense to me why they continued using Pascal after Modula-2
came out, as it's much more straightforward, and is great for writing
large programs. Ok, there's some additional work for programmers like
the FROM statements, but that's no worse than C's include statements.
For example, the following:
PROGRAM SayHello(INPUT, OUTPUT)
BEGIN
WHILE (TRUE)
BEGIN
WRITELN('Hello World');
END;
END.
Would become something like:
MODULE Foo;
FROM InOut IMPORT WriteLine;
BEGIN
WHILE TRUE DO
WriteLine("Hello World");
END;
END Foo.
On PCs running PC-DOS, the really neat thing about FST Modula-2 was that one
could write programs such as the following module. :-)
MODULE Sound;
FROM SYSTEM IMPORT ASSEMBLER;
BEGIN
ASM
PUSH AX
PUSH BX
PUSH CX
PUSH DX
MOV DX, 1200
IN AL, 61H
AND AL, 0FEH
AGAIN: OR AL, 2
OUT 61H, AL
MOV CX, 233
WAIT1: LOOP WAIT1
AND AL, 0FDH
OUT 61H, AL
MOV CX, 233
WAIT2: LOOP WAIT2
DEC DX
JNZ AGAIN
POP DX
POP CX
POP BX
POP AX
END;
END Sound.
The best of both worlds, what? :-)
BASIC's appeal was its simplicity and immediacy. I
don't agree with Wirth
that it pollutes the mind irrevocably either, I mostly use C++ or Java these
days and never have to use the much-maligned 'goto'. The only time I use
As one who had to unscramble and re-write some very lengthy BASIC code
with two-digit character names and very, very, few comments, multiple
statments on single lines, lots of gotos and gosubs, some of which
actually went nowhere in the end when earlier changes had been made in
the code, I can understand why the dislike for BASIC exists. BASIC is
great for small programs, but not so good for other things if
carelessly written. Of course, I can see where it helps some
programmers familiar with such spaghetti code to keep their jobs, as
replacing some of them may be difficult.
Disclaimer: Having writen some obfuscated C code, I have no right to
criticize the "spaghetti BASIC" coders. ...of course, as we all know,
C is a more legtimate language than BASIC, since it can be obfuscated
to a level far beyond the comprehension of BASIC programmers. ;-)
--
Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals:
All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
rdd(a)rddavis.net 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such
http://www.rddavis.net beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.
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3 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Alan.Pearson＠cramersystems.com -
allain＠panix.com -
jss＠subatomix.com -
rdd＠smart.net