| GW-Basic is one of the earliest computer programming languages. It has fallen into disuse, having been superseded by more sophisticated user-programs. Modern programs are great to use but how they actually do what they do is unknown to their users simply because the program code is hidden. GW-Basic is different, in that the code is listed, in sequence, and so one can see the steps a program takes when it runs. When one has learnt to program in GW-Basic, programs can be written to do whatever one wants to do.
Programs written by novice programmers often reveal things that ought to have been included but were not thought of at the time. Novice programmers adjust or correct these oversights by adding in bits of code, sometimes in such an haphazard manner that it is called "spaghetti" programming, often misusing the infamous "goto" instruction. With experience, a programmer becomes more circumspect and writes structured programs, where blocks of code, or modules, are set out in logical sequence. Structured, logical thinking is a useful thing to have, regardless of what one does in life, and GW-Basic, despite being old-fashioned, is a means to learn it, whilst creating one's own programs. So we see that there is a good reason for having the program code open to view rather than out of sight as happens with modern programming languages that use compiled code. |