[Info-vax] Programming languages, was: Re: VMS documentation

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-03-17, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> On 3/16/2022 8:55 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-03-16, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> On 3/16/2022 8:09 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Basic on the various DEC systems.
>>>
>>> Wirth, Dijkstra etc. did not like Basic.
>>>
>>> But yes - Basic is also an easy language to learn.
>>>
>>
>> Easy to learn but it doesn't mean you are teaching students the right
>> things for when they need to start writing production code. :-)
>
> What makes you right, and me wrong?
>

Pascal was created after the experiences of earlier teaching languages
and was based on Wirth's experiences elsewhere. It has strong type safety
and strong modular programming concepts, essential for teaching good
programming practice.

Basic was an earlier teaching language with none of that and could easily
be considered the Javascript of its day, with a mentality based on ease
of use instead of helping the student to develop robust programming
techniques that would serve them when they started writing code for
production systems.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.