Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #623733Re: The birth of BASIC
From: hanc...
Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 19:44
Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 19:44
26 lines
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3018 bytes
On Sunday, June 3, 2018 at 10:02:43 AM UTC-4, Andrew Swallow wrote:
> On 02/06/2018 20:11, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> > On Saturday, June 2, 2018 at 12:19:34 PM UTC-4, Andrew Swallow wrote:
> >
> >> The writers of BASIC obviously knew FORTRAN. They chose GOTOs over blocks.
> >
> > BASIC had GOSUB. Some BASIC's had CHAIN.
> >
>
> GOSUB is a CALL statement without parameters. Although GOSUB is
> recursive. However having to implement variables as arrays shows how
> inelegant actually recursion is.
The earlier simpler versions of BASIC allowed only a branch in an
IF statement, e.g. IF A=B THEN {go to branch}. Later versions
allowed an imperative statement after the THEN as well as some
logical arrangement, such as ELSE. M/S QuickBasic allowed SELECT CASE.
My point is that even back circa 1970, programmers were making
their programs modular, even in BASIC. While it might not have
been "pure" structured programming, it was a step forward. By
then, programmers realized that in complicated programs spaghetti
code was bad and endeavored to avoid it.
As someone else mentioned, just having a "structured" program without
GOTO's did not eliminate the risk of creating confusing spaghetti code.
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