On Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 17:50:09 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
BASIC was polished and shipped with literally every single home
computer in the 80s. Primitive yes, but widely used. Much more
so than D. It did exactly what it was supposed to do and didn't
have any incomplete features.
Well i'd say it had incomplete features, having goto/gosub and
global variables; Although it worked it bred spaghetti code like
crazy.
I'm sure BASIC would have had more features if they could have
fit them into the ROM; But like the TCC (Tiny C Compiler) they
first added what was most important and added additional features
afterwards until they couldn't fit anything else while shaving
every byte they could along the way.
Curiously i wrote a de-tokenizer a year or something ago and
some of the features bled through a bit quite obviously; All math
and number storage being done with a 6 byte BCD packed format
(that I'm told is also used in calculators) while the line
numbers were unsigned shorts (probably for sorting reasons). It
had the interesting effect of having to convert the 16bit line
number using division while printing the program out, and then
just outputting the numbers for everything else with a quick
conversion from BCD to string.
But BASIC shined most when there was so little memory. It wasn't
uncommon to have only 4k for available RAM; And you could write
short yet useful programs in 4k.
