Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Tue Jan 09 2024 04:56:41

On 08 Jan 2024 at 08:05a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> -=> tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-
 DW> 
 DW>  te> It was always easy to pick out the kids who'd been
 DW>  te> exposed to COBOL and then learned C; their C code
 DW>  te> tended to be overly verbose and not terribly idiomatic.
 DW>  te> It'd take them a good while to come up to speed.
 DW> 
 DW> For me, the "tell" was no local variables and functions had a huge
 DW> number of parameters and sub-functions.  But I think that goes with the
 DW> "not terribly idiomatic" category.

For me, it was always the loop structure and not using
the library effectively.

 DW> Did you know that 'lint' crashes if you have too many local variables?
 DW> I didn't until I had to run some C-COBOL through it.

I totally believe that.  It was a research prototype,
after all!

 DW>  te> The ones who came from BASIC had it the worst, though.
 DW> 
 DW> It depends, but you're mostly right.
 DW> 
 DW> I learned BASIC on my own.  But by the end of High School, I had already
 DW> "discovered" Structured Programming (before I even knew who Edsger
 DW> Dijkstra was), using GOSUB and minimizing GOTOs.  Commodore BASIC didn't
 DW> have WHILE/WEND loops until much later.

Yeah.  A lot of folks who self-taught themselves BASIC
on 8 and 16 bit micros picked up better practices, but
they were in such a constrained environment it was hard
for them take advantage of more advanced structures.

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