[Coco] History repeats itself

[James Jones]

Going through old documents, I found something I wrote as a followup to an
article in 268'm by Aaron Banerjee about recursion and recursion
elimination. I also looked at the the eight queens problem, but, save for
one program at the very end, the code is in BASIC09.

I don't remember whether I ever submitted the followup to 268'm, or whether
it was ever printed. I'm rewriting it for clarity and to improve the
formatting from the listing I have (and so I can toss the printout!), and
during the rewrite, I noticed one thing:

In a procedure that included EXITIF statements, I did not originally follow
the indentation that BASIC09 imposes on its source listings.

In the revision, I will keep to the way BASIC09 does it, because I know
better now.

Recently, I've taken up the Go programming language. Its designers,
including Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, wanted to avoid all the bikeshedding
and hoohah and holy wars about code layout that afflicts some programming
languages. The gofmt program establishes a layout standard that does so,
and means Go programmers don't have to adapt to a new layout convention
when moving from place to place or project to project.

I appreciate the wisdom of that choice, and my respect for the people
responsible for BASIC09, at least some of whom I had the honor of working
with at Microware, is that much higher because they realized it was a good
choice... almost *three decades* before Go.