Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.uucp (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Being a consultant
Message-ID: <769@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 21 Aug 89 14:31:13 GMT
References: <5595@ficc.uu.net> <6221@hubcap.clemson.edu> <166@bbxeng.UUCP> <5778@ficc.uu.net> <211@voa3.UUCP>
Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.uucp (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 17

In article <211@voa3.UUCP> ck@voa3.UUCP (Chris Kern) writes:
>[He was typing BASIC statements into his command interpreter (shell).]
>
>Thus has it been since the Dawn of BASIC.  This type of "problem" was
>not uncommon when I first started programming in BASIC at Dartmouth in
>1965 (although, naturally, I don't remember ever being guilty of such a
>solecism myself).

When I was at Dartmouth in the 70's, line number based editing
was implemented by the shell (more or less), and all of the compilers
could handle files that had line numbers.  (Only Basic let you use
the numbers as statement labels, though.)  So it was very easy to
create a file or edit one, without having to learn a lot of editing
commands.  And the line numbers could be stripped off if you didn't
want to keep them.

-- Jeff