[Coco] [Non-DoD Source] Coco Digest, Vol 186, Issue 47

[Taylor, Phillip L CIV]

VisualBasic.net and other compilers like Realbasic allows you to write code with only a few line numbers or none depending on the type of program your running.  It's quick enough to wrote professional commercial software.


Message: 7
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 17:06:38 +0000
From: Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com>
To: "coco at maltedmedia.com" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Subject: Re: [Coco] C VS Basic Coco


On 02/14/2018 08:02 AM, Francis Swygert wrote:
> From: Scott Wendt <malfunct at msn.com>
>
> I don't want to stir up any arguments, because whatever language that gets the job done and is the one you want to use is the one you should use, but I think the things that make BASIC easy to get started with are the same ones that makes it poorly suited for complex projects.
>
> A lot of the extra "stuff" in structured languages are there to represent program structure and does really lend to the readability and maintainability of large complex projects. For me personally brackets and indentation are super important for identifying logical blocks of code.
> ==============================================
> I find that amusing! I've never coded in anything but CoCo BASIC, but have followed and modified some C code... with explicit directions on what to modify and where.
>
> I find the use of brackets and indentations MUCH more confusing than well coded BASIC with line numbers. Part of you know what you learn, I guess. Unless you really packed BASIC code, subroutines generally start with a whole number (like 500... with a "GOTO 500" to go to that routine). What's hard to find about that?
Ask Dykstra.  Or just look at the decades of research into why GOTOs are 
bad.
In one of my last professional programming gigs I took more than a dozen
programs heavily laced with GOTOs (true spaghetti code!!) and using proper
structured programming removed all of them.  While I am not one who heavily
favors standards bodies I think when they decided to come up with a BASIC
standard it should have deprecated the GOTO entirely.

bill