[Info-vax] Error Messages in Basic - %BASIC-E-PARMODNOT, mode for parameter <n> of routine <procedure-name> not as declared

[Neil Rieck]

On Sunday, June 9, 2019 at 10:45:46 AM UTC-4, Dave Froble wrote:

> 
> Oh, no, I've been exposed!  I was posing as a "professional programmer" 
> when I guess I'm really not a "professional programmer".
> 

No offense was intended but IMHO "option type=explicit" pushes VMS-BASIC (or whatever it is called these days) into the direction of strongly typed languages like C.

We all forget that BASIC was originally created (at Dartmouth) as a language to teach programming concepts prior to learning FORTRAN. Not using "option type=explicit" is like riding a bicycle with training wheels. Using "option type=explicit" is like removing the training wheels.

>From the Annals: before y2k, I was part of a large group of programmers in Toronto. One of the things I did after joining that group was to include "option type=explicit" as the first line in every one of the ~ 400 programs (then making sure they would all compile). A year later I moved on to a different project.

A couple of years after that, I was asked to return for a short time (6 weeks) to help fix some bugs that had crept in since I left. You'll never guess what I saw:

1) some young bugger wrote a script to remove "option type=explicit" from all the source code. (I suppose he found this a nuisance)

2) one of the programs he modified had a bug where the whole program manipulated an integer named something like "v%" but he had introduced a few lines of new code where he was only testing "v"

GIGO.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.