Old Skills Revisited
Oct. 2nd, 2009 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prophet_marcusI've finally managed to put together that study program I was working on. What made it hard was that the help files for the Basic I got are not compatible with VISTA. So I installed the program on an older machine. Fiddle with this, adjust that and presto! A working program.
But for some reason, this version of Basic doesn't support the old ON...GOTO function. Okay, saving a few lines of code isn't as important as it was 30 years ago, but it was such a good way of handling option menus back in the day. On the favorable side, they made line numbers unnecessary (but still usable) by allowing the use of labels sort of like function names from object languages. They have no purpose except to act as branching targets (and making it easier to locate desired parts of code if you pick descriptive labels), but I like them. And the program runs on the main family computer - only the help files were crippled. So now I can practice Japanese more. It really is fun. And of course it can be used to make any sort of quiz. With some fiddling, I could even include graphic questions. Hmmm, a challenge.
But for some reason, this version of Basic doesn't support the old ON...GOTO function. Okay, saving a few lines of code isn't as important as it was 30 years ago, but it was such a good way of handling option menus back in the day. On the favorable side, they made line numbers unnecessary (but still usable) by allowing the use of labels sort of like function names from object languages. They have no purpose except to act as branching targets (and making it easier to locate desired parts of code if you pick descriptive labels), but I like them. And the program runs on the main family computer - only the help files were crippled. So now I can practice Japanese more. It really is fun. And of course it can be used to make any sort of quiz. With some fiddling, I could even include graphic questions. Hmmm, a challenge.
