Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 11/21/24 3:09 AM, Pancho wrote:

On 11/20/24 21:05, Rich wrote:

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 20 Nov 2024 03:37:58 -0500
"186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>

Hmmmmmmmm ... how many now have EVER programmed in BASIC ? Should do
a survey .....

>
Lord, who hasn't!? Well, probably depends on how you choose to qualify
it - we still use VB6 in-house at $EMPLOYER, and FreeBASIC is my go-to
for hacking together quick utility applications in daily life, but I
haven't touched old-school line-number spaghetti-Gotoese BASIC since
childhood, and certainly never built any application of real complexity
with it. Bet more than a few people here have, though, especially if we
cross-posted over to a.f.computers...

>
Given the typical age of most posters here, I'd say nearly every one of
us has written /something/ in one or more of the 75 different variants
of "BASIC" that have existed over time.
>

 For me: BBC Basic, VAX Basic, Visual Basic (&VBA).
 GOTO was deprecated before BBC Basic circa 1981. I never really saw it, apart from reasonable GOTO error usages. Wasn't it more a sign of lack of training than a linguistic feature?

   I found a good way to use GOTO however - in a handheld
   device where you had to enter several kinds of data
   about a location. The structure was a sort of "ladder"
   and pressing buttons would take you up and down the
   ladder via GOTOs. If you needed to edit yer last entry
   you just jumped one step up. The handheld only had a
   4-line display alas, so you couldn't show even one
   entire record, only one prompt at a time.
   Now each entry was only a few lines of code - the input,
   an error-detector and the up/down GOTO thing. Easy to
   keep track of. GOTO made the pgm simpler and more
   compact.