Tuesday, August 17, 2010

A Conversation

Geek 1: Here's an LOL for ya... My co-worker is our VMS guy here, and programs in Perl in VI on the VMS server. I introduced him to Notepad++ today and syntax highlighting, and he almost had a heart attack, and can't stop thanking me... he was so amazed.
Geek 2:  His civilization has just been introduced to Fire.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Welcome back, GOSUB

Okay, who here remembers GOSUB?

Wow, that few?  Okay, GOSUB was a feature of BASIC implementations pre VB.Net.  It executed a subroutine that was defined within another routine, sort of like this:

Dim x as Integer
x = 1
Gosub Sub1
x = 0

Sub1:
x = x + 1
Return

If the syntax is a bit off, it's because I haven't even seen a GOSUB in many years.  (I'm capitalizing it because I originally learned it in Apple II Basic, where all things were capitalized.)  VB.Net did away with it on the grounds that it isn't structured, entirely correctly in my opinion.  You see, a subroutine in a GOSUB had the same scope as the parent routine, and so had access to all its variables.

Which brings us back to my previous post, about anonymous methods having access to the variables in the routines in which they are defined, even if they are invoked from outside the method.  It occurred to me that this basically replicates the GOSUB.  Consider the following:


int i = 0;

Action a = () =>
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("I am routine 'A'");
i++;
};

Action b = () =>
{
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("I am routine 'B'");
i++;
};

// Regular inline code

i = 1;
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("I am inline code");
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("The value of i is currently {0}",i);

a();
b();

System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("I am inline code again");
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("And the value of i is now {0}",i);

The only way in which this differs in function from the Basic above is that the Action variables have to have anonymous methods assigned to them before they are invoked, rather than after as was the norm (and perhaps a requirement) in Basic.

Welcome back, GOSUB.