On Fri, 18 Oct 2019, at 23:34, John Hasler wrote: > I guess some people who started with BASIC do eventually recover.
It's not all that bad. At my first place of employment, we ran WATERLOO BASIC (from the University of Waterloo) for students to learn how to program. This was on an IBM mainframe, running VM/CMS, and the text editor (Xedit) was programmable. I wrote a set of fairly complex Xedit 'macro' programs which allowed students to write code in an extended non-line- numbered syntactically-sugared version of the language, with what appeared to be 'proper' procedures/functions. As they exited from the editor, the macros converted the code they'd typed back to the more basic form of the language for it to be run, and as they started to edit one of these programmes the GOTO-ridden code would be transformed into the apparently more structured version of the language. Unfortunately we could only let the more competent students use the 'better' language, because they had to understand the 'on the fly' changes that were made... so they could cope with runtime error messages from the actual (less sophistcated) code, which didn't precisely match what they saw in the text editor. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
