[Flipside]

Hmmm...Yeah, it might have been GOSUB that was the nasty one, the only situation I can remember using GOTO in a loop was the dreaded FOR...NEXT loops because you couldn't define any exit conditions, so you could have something like

10 FOR X=1 TO 10
20 IF (X+Y)>30 THEN GOTO 40
30 NEXT

It may have just been the practice the was drummed into me, but for REPEAT...UNTIL loops, I always used to use a 'flag', so you'd have

10 REPEAT
20 X=X+1
30 UNTIL X=10 OR (X+Y)>30

or

10 LET EXIT = FALSE
20 REPEAT
30 X=X+1
40 IF (X+Y)>30 THEN EXIT=TRUE
50 UNTIL X=10 OR EXIT=TRUE

That, iirc was considered a more 'correct' way of doing it

Sorry, getting my coding brain in gear here for starting at college

[Scooby_Doo]

Using exceptions to break out of a loop is a bad idea.  Cluttering and confusing to people who haven't seen your code... Not to mention slower.

I kinda like:
10 LET EXIT = FALSE
20 REPEAT
30 X=X+1
40 IF (X+Y)>30 THEN EXIT=TRUE
50 UNTIL X=10 OR EXIT=TRUE


better.  Easier to step through debug 

[kode]

The correct way to break out of nested loops is either a boolean flag or an exception, though.

You do NOT use exceptions for non-exceptional events!

(that's tip 34 from the pragmatic programmers by andrew hunt and david thomas, btw. a book well worth reading, and always keep at your side while programming.)

[Flipside]

Heh, I think my least favourite language was 6502 machine code. The problem with 6502 was that it had 3 8-Bit registers to play with, and you couldn't even link them together to make 16 Bit ones like you could in Z80, so if you wanted to access, say, a look-up table (start + offset), you had to use Indirect Referencing, i.e. point to the address that held the adress that you wanted to jump to. Add to that the fact that older computers ALWAYS used lsb-msb ordering for addresses and you had the ultimate migraine recipe

[Roanoke]

I sometimes read the Python tuts when I'm hella bored at work........

[Fragrag]

*snip*

*snip*

QFT², I tried dabbling in programming several times, when I was 10, 12 and 13. I'm 14 now by the way. Granted, learning C++ and other languages were already too complicated for my age but if making a program just to say 'hello' takes 4 lines of rather incomprehensible lines (What the hell does 'int argc, char *argv' mean?) then I'm not surprise that kids today aren't dabbling in programming, it's just getting complicated. By the way, the simplest language I tried was Python.

[Ghostavo]

*snip*

*snip*

QFT², I tried dabbling in programming several times, when I was 10, 12 and 13. I'm 14 now by the way. Granted, learning C++ and other languages were already too complicated for my age but if making a program just to say 'hello' takes 4 lines of rather incomprehensible lines (What the hell does 'int argc, char *argv' mean?) then I'm not surprise that kids today aren't dabbling in programming, it's just getting complicated. By the way, the simplest language I tried was Python.

Well, when I learned C++ (my first and only experience with programming) the teachers sort of avoided that by:

Code: [Select]

void main()

And only much later when we made stuff other than the main did they explain what that meant.

C++ sounds simple enough, never understood how people find it complicated.

[Kamikaze]

Just out of curiosity, how hard is java and lisp compared to c++?

Ever read through Stroustrup's _The_C++_Programming_Language_? C++ is one of the most ridiculously complex programming languages in the world.

Comparatively, Lisp is incredibly simple (Particularly Scheme; it's my favorite Lisp dialect). There's barely any syntax and the basis of the language can be described in about 40 pages (http://www.r6rs.org/r6rs_91.pdf).

Java also aims to be simple, but it's actually just crippled and bloated from the poor "let's make it more like C++ after stripping it way down first" style of design.

I'm also puzzled at why peole still think BASIC is good for teaching anything. The basics of Python, Ruby, or even Perl are pretty easy to pick up. All three have far better libraries than any BASIC dialect except maybe VB.Net (pretty sure CPAN beats the hell out of .Net though). It's also worth keeping in mind that Python runs on .Net (IronPython) and Ruby runs on the Java platform (JRuby) nowadays.

Using exceptions to break out of a loop is a bad idea.

True, but there are exceptions even to this rule (no pun intended). For example, exceptions are the right way to break out of while loops in Objective Caml, because while loops are very weak due to the pure functional design. Though it's often better to use recursion in OCaml anyway.

[Flipside]

Pascal was always a good language to start with, it was not much more complex than Basic, but had the beginnings of more modern approaches to programming in it. It's pretty long in the tooth nowadays however, and Delphi, it's supposed 'Next Generation' is confusing as hell :/

Edit : Oh, and COBOL is the language of Satan...

[Scooby_Doo]

Two langauges I wanted to learn... Ocaml and eiffel...
Eiffel isn't well supported and their .NET version is rather blah..

I gave perl 2 tries and gave up... I extremely dislike typeless languages.

I suppose lisp wouldn't be so bad, as long as you don't mind seeing (((())))) the rest of your life 

[kode]

hah, yeah. back when I did it for a uni class, most of the debugging was to count opening and closing parentheses.

[Kamikaze]

That's why you need to use a good editor. I use vim to do all my editing; it automatically matches parantheses as I type.

[Descenterace]

The correct way to break out of nested loops is either a boolean flag or an exception, though.

You do NOT use exceptions for non-exceptional events!

(that's tip 34 from the pragmatic programmers by andrew hunt and david thomas, btw. a book well worth reading, and always keep at your side while programming.)

Did I say otherwise? But if having to drop out of a deeply-nested loop is not an exceptional event, the loop structure and terminating conditions need to be rethought.

A good general rule is to only throw meaningful exception types and think very carefully before deriving your own exception class. If your loop breakout exception violates either of these, the loop conditions need to be rethought.

[kode]

nested loops are the devil anyhow.

[Descenterace]

Sometimes they're required, but it's rare that you need to drop out of one under non-exceptional circumstances.

[Scooby_Doo]

Course one possible solution is to have the inner loop stuck within another function (make it an inline function)

[Hippo]

1 print "**** basic"
2 print "use c++"
3 goto 1
run


god i havent touched basic in yonks. a higher level code is awalys better.

[Flipside]

Basic is higher level than C++, the lowest level code is Assembler

[ZylonBane]

1 print "**** basic"
2 print "use c++"
3 goto 1
run


god i havent touched basic in yonks. a higher level code is awalys better.

And yet you illustrate exactly how much more expressive and easy to remember it is.

[Hippo]

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
     cout << "**** basic\n" << "use c++";

     return 0;
}




I dont know loops yet, so dont get me on that, but i find that much easier to manage, and much more powerful. and they're both off the top of my head, so i dont claim accountability for errors.

Basic was definately easier to run, but with something like visual studio, c++ isnt hard to compile and run either