programming is terrible: Why did Dijkstra Hate Basic?: "The thing people forget is that programming was substantially different in 1975. Dijkstra railed against Dartmouth Basic—a glorified assembler language. It isn’t the BASIC used today–
Variables names were one letter long with an optional digit
Although FOR was present - while loops, break and other niceties were implemented with unrestricted goto.
Whitespace was optional between expressions.
Subroutines were available. GOSUB line number and RETURN.
All parameter passing had to be done with the existing global variables.
26 user defined functions could exist FNA-FNZ, which could contain one line of code.
IF statements were also limited to one line of code."
'via Blog this'
