' Rapid-Q by William Yu (c)1999-2000                                             .
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' Upload_il_tuo_script_su_Rapidq.it

' GOTO_and_GOSUB

****** Introduction to Branching ******
Branching seems to be very popular in BASIC, mainly because in the old days,
BASIC was very unstructured and didn't carry with it the concepts we now see
today. Sure, some say it's still unstructured, but so is a lot of other
languages depending on your coding style. Branching is just the mechanism of
skipping (or jumping) instructions, either forward or backward. It's much like
writing SUBs and FUNCTIONs, just a bit more unstructured as you'll see.

What_are_labels?
Before talking about GOTOs and GOSUBs, you'll need to understand what labels
are. You can think of them as bookmarks, they don't actually do anything, but
you can use labels as a guide. The following are valid labels:
    Label1:
    100
    10.5
A label always appears as the first statement and can be any number or a named
label. A named label must end with a colon : symbol. After any label, you can
write your code as before.
    Label1:
       PRINT "some code..."
    100 PRINT "more code"
    10.5
       PRINT "yet more code"
The formatting above is just an example, it doesn't mean that a named label
can't have code on the same line.

Branching_with_GOTO
Perhaps the most shunned upon keyword in BASIC is the GOTO statement. Obviously
if you programmed in BASIC before, GOTO was used almost everywhere. This is
because GOTO was so easy to understand, and when we first jump into
programming, we don't usually pick up what subroutines and functions are.
Rapid-Q still supports GOTO, but we definitely don't encourage its use, at all.
In fact, if you find yourself using it now, you'll probably wonder why in a few
years/months as you become more experienced. Here's an example of using GOTO:
    IF I = 100 THEN GOTO 10 ELSE GOTO 20

    10 PRINT "I = 100"
       END

    20 PRINT "I is not 100"
       END
If it's so terrible, are there any penalties in its use? No. In fact, it's
probably the purest command you'll find. All it does is skip instructions, so
in the above example, if I = 200, then the lines
    10 PRINT "I = 100"
       END
are skipped. GOTO requires no stack or memory consumption, unlike GOSUB and
SUBs or FUNCTIONs. If you want to think about assembly, that's basically all
you do, branch here and there, but since BASIC is a high level language, we
usually don't like to think that way, so we avoid using GOTO if possible.

Branching_with_GOSUB_.._RETURN
Using GOSUB is actually more useful than using GOTO, but still not recommended.
It is in essence, calling a SUB without parameters. What it provides is a quick
"hack" without creating SUBs. It is often used in loops, as you may see here:
    DO
      DO
        A$ = INKEY$
      LOOP UNTIL LEN(A$)

      IF A$ = "A" THEN
          GOSUB 100
      ELSEIF A$ = "B" THEN
          GOSUB 110
      ELSEIF A$ = "C" THEN
          GOSUB 110
      END IF
    LOOP

    END

    100 PRINT "A pressed"
        RETURN
    110 PRINT "B pressed"
        RETURN
    120 PRINT "C pressed"
        RETURN
The RETURN statement is used to jump back to the previous call of GOSUB. You
can think of GOSUB as a GOTO statement with a marker, and the RETURN statement
as another GOTO statement that returns to that marker.



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