"Paul Hovnanian P.E." <Paul@Hovnanian.com> wrote in message news:43BC9786.75BC2E1F@Hovnanian.com...
> Jinn Wins wrote:
>>
> [snip]
>
>> I've looked at .NET a bit. What they did with VB, point by point,
>> I agree with, but decided to not bother porting since there are too many
>> differences.
>
> The problem is that VB.NET doesn't appear to 'break' old, bad VB code.

I confess that I have run their conversion wizard only a few times.
It seems to mark most of the constructs that need marking.

>
> I used to work with a group of people who supported an old, crusty VB
> app. It had been 'rescued' from one of the old MS Basic systems that
> supported GOTOs, global variables and spaghetti code. The app had grown
> and grown over the years and nobody could figure out how the damned
> thing worked. Nobody dared touch it anymore.

People say that by default. People are whiners.
In numerous cases, a well placed and commented GOTO
is clearer than the alternatives.
There is no code that a bright programmer can't
figure out. People are lazy.

>
> About a year or so ago, they moved the source into VB.NET. Guess what?
> It still works.
>
>> They invented VB quite early, and it was bad for a long time.
>
> What do you mean 'was'?

I mean that at this point it is completely compiled, very fast,
very bug-free, a full ActiveX source and sink, plenty of
everything necessary to create fully articulated Windows programs.
Plenty of third party products, free code, examples, tutorials, etc.

> It still supports spaghetti code.

So does C++, so does Java.
Poorly formed code assemblies can be created in any language.

Most programmers will scream spaghetti the minute
they have to look at another programmer's code.
So what? Comb out the spaghetti. People are lazy whiners.

In .NET, VB is fairly equal with C#, seems,
and they've taken the hard path of actually fixing things.

I really think MS deserves some credit for that.
They could have been less bold, but I feel they took
the high road on most of those decisions.

The thing I don't get about .NET is:
"Why doesn't MS port it to other pizza boxes"

Clearly it could be ported to any processor
and hardware configuration.

The whole architecture would support transparently
running /your-app/ on any toaster it was ported to.
With optimized JIT compiled machine code on
every platform.

Architecturally, quite elegant.
I suggest reading some of the white papers if you haven't.

--
AJ - http://clitin.com
(the biggest clit in pornetry)


>
> --
> Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Happily doing the work of 3 Men ... Moe, Larry & Curly