termcap - off topic musing

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 09:54:42AM -0700, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list thus spoke:
>>      "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
>>      students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
>>      programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
>>      regeneration."  -- Dijkstra
>
>My first language was BASIC.  This quote is utter hyperbole.

True enough, but I found BASIC to be clumsy when I first saw it.

My first language was FORTRAN on the Bendix G-20 mainframe at my
first job out of college at Bendix Radio in Towson MD.  They gave
me a deck of cards, a McCracken FORTRAN manual, and the task of
speeding up that took almost a half-hour to make a single run
which required about 30,000 calls to a subroutine calculating
fresnel integrals.

Learning the basics of FORTRAN was pretty easy.  Learning to type
on an IBM 026 keypunch without having to redo every other card
was a bit harder.  It didn't take me long to figure out that the
engineer who originally wrote the program calculted SQRT(PI/2.0)
every time that subroutine was called.  Moving that to the main
program and putting it in COMMON, reduced the run time to 5
minutes.

After leaning FORTRAN, I found BASIC's requirements for a number
on each line, and referencing GOTOs and such by line number to be
nasty, first having to type all those numbers, then having to
renumber if one hadn't left enough space between line numbers to
insert code.  This was in the days of punch cards or paper tape
with 110baud Teletype terminals so global replace and such
weren't options.

Actually the first BASIC programs I wrote were on the GE time
sharing systems where I wrote some routines to renumber BASIC
programs, sending the new program back to the terminal to punch
new paper tape.  I had to use BASIC as FORTRAN and ALGOL didn't
have any useful string manipulation capabilities.  Later I used
BASIC for similar functions on the TRS-80s before Xenix came
around.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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