[XP] Code Complete: Things were Scary Back Then

Steve Holden sholden at holdenweb.com
Fri Mar 29 17:37:57 EST 2002


"Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
news:3CA4E5F5.70B5A7E5 at engcorp.com...
> David Brady wrote:
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Peter Hansen [mailto:peter at engcorp.com]
> > >
> > > I don't remember any of the BASICs that I used,
> > > whether Apple II, PET, C-64, MS, or other having modules
>
> > I did this a lot.  There was no enforcement of
> > "modules" in BASIC, but you could still do modular
> > programming.  You only had the one big program to work
> > with, but you mentally divided it up into sections.
>
> Well, I used reserved blocks of line numbers in the same
> way, but I'd hardly deign to call that "making a module".
>
I went as far as producing a programming system called BLINK which treated
non-numbered BASIC code pretty much like assembly language, assigning line
numbers dynamically as it processed the code. For those of you that can
remember PDP-11 assembly language, I even had PSECTs so you could have
several different sections of your program "assembled" into several
different ranges of line numbers.

Back in those days (1978) most Basic Plus programmers had only got as far as
standard that said "subroutines should have line numbers between 20,000 and
29,999", which meant that they often had to resolve line number clashes and
renumber the code. I even wrote this up for a DECUS conference but I doubt
if that paper is available now.

> And I didn't call the use of GOTO "sending a method to
> another object" either.  ;-)
>
Tired old cynic that you are ;-)

regards
 Steve







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