Differences between version 19 and revision by previous author of BASIC.
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| Newer page: | version 19 | Last edited on Thursday, June 3, 2004 8:40:49 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 18 | Last edited on Wednesday, May 5, 2004 8:01:19 pm | by StuartYeates | Revert |
@@ -7,9 +7,9 @@
A simplistic interactive ProgrammingLanguage designed at Dartmouth University in the 1960's to teach mathematics students how to program. They would go on to programming in [Fortran] IV, so this is the language that [BASIC] most closely resembles.
Not to be confused with VisualBasic, a wildly extended dialect of [BASIC] that only resembles its ancestor remotely and is still part of MicrosoftCorporation's portfolio and strategy.
-In the original [BASIC] language, the available control structures are as primitive as those in AssemblyLanguage. A [BASIC] program is series of numbered statements that are usually executed in sequence. A __GOTO__ statement sends execution to another statement. An __IF__ statement does that conditionally. Using __GOSUB__ and __RETURN__ you can implement subroutines, but there's no stack to pass parameters with.
+In the original [BASIC] language, the available control structures are as primitive as those in AssemblyLanguage. A [BASIC] program is series of numbered statements that are usually executed in sequence. A __[
GOTO| GoTo]
__ statement sends execution to another statement. An __IF__ statement does that conditionally. Using __GOSUB__ and __RETURN__ you can implement subroutines, but there's no stack to pass parameters with.
As there are no structuring constructs, there is no concept of scope, and every single variable is global. In the absence of user defined functions, expressiveness is extremely limited, so you need a ''lot'' of temporary variables. Combine these limitations, and the result is that most [BASIC] code is a mess that ranges somewhere between "hideous" and "appaling", with occasional side trips to "hair raising" and "seizure inducing".
;: ''It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that [[sic] have had prior exposure to [BASIC]; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.'' %%% -- EdsgerWybeDijkstra
