| ??? 12/17/09 09:12 Read: times |
#171688 - That wasn't its intent ... Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Neil said:
Per Westermark said:
The original language was designed for producing spaghetti code. That's a bit unfair! It was possible to be disciplined and write reasonably "structured" code in the absence of any real Structured constructs in the language. Yes, there were ways of being "structured." However, BASIC didn't provide much to help with that. It was sufficiently painful in FORTRAN, which was a considerably more powerful language, to maintain a large program. COBOL also had the same problems. There were also the problems of no scope, and only single-letter variable names.
But these things weren't that uncommon in those days. I doubt anyone misses those older languages very much. I do miss those days, as we were always plowing up new ground, rather than doing the "same-old same-old" time and again ... If I want to have problems remembering what I'm doing, I'll get out the assembler ... that's enough challenge for me. Even assemblers are sufficiently helpful to make it reasonably easy to write decent, well-organized, and maintainable code these days. BTW, it's possible to write spaghetti code in Pascal or in 'C', too. Those languages help you avoid it, of course, but it's still possible. In fact, people insisted on it! Don't ask me why ... RE |
