Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 11/22/24 10:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 21/11/2024 23:04, Pancho wrote:

On 11/21/24 15:45, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

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.

>
Sounds like a jump table. We still do that, but with functions rather than jumps.
>

Case statements...
 

In OO, switch/case statements were deprecated too :-) I can't remember exactly why. I think it was because we were supposed to use polymorphism instead.
In practical project terms, giant switch statements were a pain in the bum, because everyone would constantly be modifying that bit of code and you would get source code merge conflicts.
It's coming back to me, VAX BASIC programs would be designed to consist of a massive "do processing" loop, which would consist of a big switch statement containing a case for every type of report or behaviour the program was supposed to handle. Every time a new report was added, the switch had a case added.
Then it reminds me of the Gang of Four visitor pattern, every time I saw it, it took me a whole morning's thinking energy to understand that it was just a simple switch :-).
Coding is always a balance between flexibility and clarity, there is no "right" answer. You can make code more flexible by adding another layer of indirection, but it becomes harder to understand.