I had a fun walk lunch.
The most remarkable was that our conversation went from what did you do this weekend, which involved playing Legend of the Green Dragon, to the learning methods of introductory programmers in the 80’s.
It was most ammusing. The conversation stemmed from LOGD being a port of the old Legend of the Red Dragon BBS Door game. So it was breifly mentioned how poor the php code of LOGD is and how poor the Pascal code of LORD probably is. From there we of course went into a few 80’s video games for Commodore, which I never played because we were too poor to get carts. It was mentioned how cool it was because anyone could do it with ASCII art on a C64. I mentioned that I loved the Basic on my Atari much better because it had drawing primitives for line, box, circle, and options for filled or unfilled. The reply was “no Pokes and Peeks”.
While mentioning love for nice primitive basics, I had to mention the Microsoft made Amiga Basic on my Amiga1000. It actually didn’t use line numbers. It was my introduction to structured programming, and at the time, it was awesome, and truely a revolutionary basic. There were function calls, and variables actually had scope. It was about this time that the demerits of GOTO were brought up, but I suggested that GOTO and line numbers are not all that different than the branching instructions in assembly, and memory addresses.
We concluded that for a top down learner, the structure of line numbers and GOTO would not make much sense, but to someone learning bottom up, it would. The bottom up learner would have known what microprocessor instructions look like, and line numbers would correspond to instruction addresses, and GOTO to the common jump instruction. Primitive BASIC then becomes a natural abstraction.