valve gear design sofware

This is worth a look, whatever Djikstra said...

www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/bbcwin.html

Neil

I couldn't help looking that man up in the wiki Neil and noticed the comment computer science was in crisis in 1968 etc. Interesting one. The only language standard that did stick to there guns and tried to prevent programmers from doing all sort of things is Cobol. C++ did initially but like all it didn't last. Really a lot of the changes are down to deskilling the problem of producing reliable maintainable code and have nothing what so ever to do with the basic (pun) problem. Fashion can be one. I once did some work on some one else's code who came from the subroutines are wonderful era - when I traced the flow of something that was acting up I went 16 deep and decided that the guy was a nut and just junked it and replaced the lot. No doubt he had been told that subroutines were the way.

Truth is structure techniques cab be achieved in any language they just look different. Trouble is that some need something like a GOTO to do it but what's wrong with that if it's to somewhere rather logical like the end of a while do loop. The only problem with GOTO is some will just do that and stuff the rest of the things that might be going on.. I've even heard senior pundits state that these sort of loops are bad idea as programmers blah blah .. so get rid of them. They'd probably love pure in line code with no branches at all. Actually that's not a bad approach but seldom possible.

John

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The joy of BBC Basic for Wiindows is it gives you all those 'real' structured progamming tools while letting you write ordinary BASIC as well.

The good fun was in the old days when knowing what was where in ROM you could speed things up by a judicious call.

Imagine how fast a BBC B would be if it was running everything the same but at 2.4 gig?

I've had a look at BBC basic, and it's tempting, but I'd have to rewrite everything again. Dosbox is solving the current problem, I'll keep slogging away at the graphics issue when time permits, but we retired chaps don't have a lot of time!