I had to search for the proverbial needle in a haystack of Visual Basic (a.k.a. "VB") legacy code this morning. It was one of the few times that being able to jump to a specific line number would have been really handy. But of course CTRL+G does something completely different in Microsoft's IDE.
I remarked to one of the slightly younger programmers how ironic it is that Visual Basic doesn't have a "GOTO line number" feature like the its ancestor, the Basic language of the TRS-80s and Apple IIs upon which I first learned to code. (That flavor of Basic lived and died by line numbers.)
The other programmer looked at me blankly, so I had to explain that, back-in-the-day, you couldn't just GOTO a named block of code; you had to jump to a specific line number. "But if the line number changed, you'd have to change all those GOTOs," he said, "That would suck." "Yes, yes it did," I replied.
It sucked almost as much as feeling that generation gap whack me upside the head. But I didn't mention that.
