Re: Larkin, Power BASIC cannot be THAT good:

On Sat, 16 May 2009 21:44:20 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaonStpealmtje@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 16 May 2009 13:59:30 -0700) it happened John Larkin
<jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<ul9u0553o8205ncuv7ev9lv0o24fdhr8rc@xxxxxxx>:

You can't argue that C (and its culture) generally results in good or
secure executables, because it so obviously doesn't.

Obviously does, as Linux is written in C (the kernel, the drivers, and many if
not most applications).


The advantage of Linux is that many, many eyeballs review the code,
and the authors know that their code will be seen and criticized in
public. That probably encourages them to be more careful. Plus, the
code is debugged by many, many people.

Most programmers work on their bit of code alone. Nobody checks their
source code but themselves. They don't comment because they figure
they will remember their design intent forever, or because they were
never taught to document their own code.


C++ OTOH is not something I consider a language, and you may be right
about that.

But C is like having the soldering iron on the hardware so to speak.
You can do anything right, and anything wrong.
While other languages (except for asm) have some more distance,
Like you on the bench with the remote control.

For real design C is a must :-)

What do you mean by "real design"? I do real products in assembly.
Most truly mission-critical, lives-depend-on-it programming (like the
stuff that flies airplanes) is done in Ada.

For user work BASIC will do.

BASIC is great for people like engineers who just want to get the
computing done, correctly. PRINT USING alone is a good reason to
program in BASIC.


;-)

To be a bit more serious, the old BASIC had those gotos and line numbers,
you got stuck with no space between line numbers, and needed a renumber routine.
I found asm much more easy than that BASIC because the assembler allowed me nice
long labels.
BASIC has come a long way since then.

Absolutely. PB has all the modern constructs, WHILE, CASE, TRY/CATCH,
graphics, all that. But I still think in state machines, and GOTO is a
perfectly good way to structure state machines. Nothing flow-charts as
nicely as a program based on GOTOs. The anti-GOTO nonsense was started
by Dijkstra, who didn't program much himself and didn't have regular
access to a computer.

Software should be like hardware: do it the cleanest way, take your
time, document it thoroughly, get it right the first pass.

It rarely is. If you consider all the components of a complex system,
software is the least reliable, the hardest to manage, the hardest to
maintain, the most likely to destroy the company, and usually the most
expensive.

John

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