From: le@main.lekno.ws
J.D. Baldwin wrote:
>
> In the previous article, Louis Epstein wrote:
>> Having basically only worked in BASIC despite a collegiate exposure
>> to Fortran 77,what do you see as the advantages of these other
>> languages?
>
> It must be said that BASIC evolved over the years and Visual Basic in
> 2010 did not especially resembled Dartmouth BASIC in 1983. That said:
My experience was mainly in the late 1970s,centered on Northstar BASIC
used for 8080 machines.
> #1 by far: The modularity is built in. "Subroutines" in (regular,
> original) BASIC are a kludgy hack at best.
I suppose they're what I was used to creating.
> Also on the list would be variable scoping, which concept kind of
> includes passing by reference vs. passing by value when calling
> functions. Everything in BASIC was "global" -- and I am not of the
> prevailing opinion that (almost) nothing ever should be global, but
> *definitely* things should be local unless there is a good reason to
> the contrary.
>
> File handling in BASIC was an abomination. Integration with other
> languages was nonexistent. Pointers and memory handling were just not
> a thing. Error handling was absolutely ghastly. Comments were ugly
> to the point that they were semi-unreadable, which is really a bad
> thing for your code's *comments*.
I've never been much of a commenter...probably
related to my bias toward working in my head
rather than the "show all work" mentality that
cost me grades in college because it struck me
as semi-literate to spell out what you didn't
need to.
> It wasn't as bad as COBOL, at least. That's the lowest bar ever set
> for anything, right there, but it's true.
Yet Grace Hopper was revered.
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
