On Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 19:42:46 UTC, Era Scarecrow
wrote:
Well i'd say it had incomplete features, having goto/gosub and
global variables; Although it worked it bred spaghetti code
like crazy.
Not incomplete features, just a very very very bad feature set.
:-)
I added my own BASIC instructions on the C64 when I was in my
late teens. You had a section at address $C000 where you could
put 4K of machine language without interfering with BASIC. I
believe I added some commands for sound.
Of course, there were also expansion cartridges that would give
you extra commands and so on.
BASIC was also the CLI, so it took the role as a primitive
version of Bash on Unix.
I'm sure BASIC would have had more features if they could have
fit them into the ROM;
I believe Microsoft made adaptions for each machine. The BASIC
dialect could be quite different. Didn't matter too much, the
hardware was different too ;-).
Computer magazines had an enormous amount of listings of BASIC
programs you could punch in. "Continued in next issue". :-D
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.
Yes, VIC20 had 3.5K left for BASIC.
