TI Conditionals & Spaghetti Code

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(05-20-2024 10:10 AM)C.Ret Wrote:  Have all the users of the SR-52, TI-59 and Ti58 been eaten by a Raptor?

I am still here, although I was an intensive Ti user at that time :-) Honestly, I always considered the automatic renumbering of GOTO lines a very smart feature of Ti's keystroke programming paradigm. Something that I really missed using some implementations of BASIC where you had to manually adjust your GOTO target lines after renumbering. With Ti's calculators, basically every program line can be used as a label. Just like in FORTRAN where you can put a numeric label to any line.

I have worked a lot with legacy software written in FORTRAN that was full of GOTO instructions. Of course it was not as clear as a modern structured code, but I never had any major problem with it. The only feature that caused headaches sometimes were the infamous "computed GOTO" statements that were common in early FORTRAN code. I usually did not touch normal GOTO jumps, but replaced computed GOTOs with IF-THEN-ELSE structures.

By the way: Ti calculators had their own computed GOTO though indirect jumping. E.g. "GTO ind 18" would jump to the line number stored in memory register 18. How smart is that ;-) But I agree that the resulting code might get a little bit hard to understand...

Regards
Max