[Coco] C VS Basic Coco

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 02/14/2018 04:21 PM, James Jones wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>   Standards exist to codify existing practice, unfortunate as it may be.
> There are two standards for BASIC: "Minimal BASIC", which is much like the
> original BASIC (Dartmouth), and "Full BASIC", which has structured control
> flow constructs and I believe is very much like True BASIC. (Not quite up
> to spending $60 to find out; standards organizations make their living that
> way.)

Hardly.  The latest COBOL standard has been pretty much ignored by
the COBOL user community because very little of what was put into
it was desired or asked for by the that community.

Standards bodies have stopped even looking at ANSI-M (MUMPS)
even though the language is still very much in use and in active
development.

The reason for the above is probably stated in your last sentence.
Who is going to pay for a standard they didn't want and have no
intention of using. So the standards bodies go back to their ivory
towers and pretend the user communities that disagree with them
don't even exist.

Probably comes from their academic roots.

bill