'goto" gone from computer languages or is it!

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Vintage" == Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> writes:

 Vintage> On Thu, 12 May 2005, Allison wrote:
 >> Basic is a language that is easy to code badly.
 >> 
 >> I'm one of the few that was mostly BASIC and ASM until UCSD
 >> P-system and decided to learn a "structured" language.  I was eye
 >> opening the difference coding learned.  After that I tried writing
 >> basic using block structure and treating goto and return like Call
 >> and JUMP with better looking results. I can see the effect it had
 >> looking at some of my really old code.

 Vintage> My high school compsci teacher introduced me to "structured
 Vintage> programming" in BASIC, and I accepted it, but it still
 Vintage> seemed to stifle my creativity.  

No wonder -- structured programming in Basic is like doing carpentry
with a nail file and a brick as your only tools.

 Vintage> In the second semester he
 Vintage> forced me into Pascal.  Let's face it: the UCSD Pascal
 Vintage> system just sucks.  I was willing to go along with it and
 Vintage> learn Pascal until one day I put in the wrong disk during a
 Vintage> proscribed disk swap and, instead of having proper error
 Vintage> recovery, the OS proceeded to overwrite my disk with
 Vintage> something else, losing all my source code.  I swore off
 Vintage> Pascal from that moment on.

I didn't realize the implementation was that bad.  Unfortunate that
you mistook implementation incompetence as a reflection on the
language rather than on the implementers.

My experience was just the opposite -- started in high school with
Algol (THE system), detoured through Fortran 2, assembler, and
BASIC-PLUS, then at U of Ill took a compiler course where the prof
forced us to use his (Cornell U) PL/1 "compiler" -- an utter piece of
trash.  In mid-course its defects were so obvious even to its creator
that he allowed us to switch to Pascal on the DEC-10, which was
excellent. 

	   paul