Ah, GOSUB. That word takes me back to my Apple II programming as a kid.
My dad started teaching me BASIC and I remember him commenting early on, ‘Having a lot of GOSUBs is the sign of a good program.’ He didn’t elaborate as I was too young to understand that subroutines demonstrate efficiency. I didn’t get GOSUB. I didn’t know what a subroutine was.
Cut to forty years later: I was at an Apple II users event, showing part of a game I’d written thirty years before that called Alien Exodus, and someone at the event looked at the first line of the program, which was like
GOTO 10000
and he laughed and joked, ‘Worst program ever!’
I explained that the earlier lines in Applesoft BASIC run faster than later ones, so it was best to have subroutines at the front and one-off initialisation down near the end.
Now I was the master.
-Wade