On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 03:13:03PM -0400, Kuba Ober spake thusly: ... > > Thanks for the link! IIRC Micro$oft Extended Color Basic used > > precisely COW for its string heap (yes I'm *that* old :-) > > So you did interface to the string heap from assembly or C, right? peeking and > poking was a lot of fun :) BTW the guy/gal who invented names of peek and > poke should be honoured somewhere. Maybe in a BSDM hall of fame.
Not really assembly... peeking and poking workarounds to the "official" extended Basic string commands which filled up the heap quickly, necessitating a garbage collection. This was a word processor (worked great in 32k!), so frequent garbage collections lasting a few seconds would badly interrupt the creative flow of the writer :-( > I did use gwbasic on PC's quite some (which is probably very similar to > extended color basic IIRC). Then I switched to QuickBasic. Then to > TurboPascal, then to Ada and C++ :) > > I didn't have the (mis-)pleasure of using M$ basic on non-x86 hardware. There > were way better basic systems out there at the time. Does anybody out there > remember Z-basic? It was probably 5 times faster than any M$ basic ever was, > and it did create both .com and .exe files that were too small to believe > that they would work (yes, they were standalone). Basic09 on OS-9 on the Dragon 64. Almost as fast as compiled but was P-system like. Produced also very small standalone executables. Actually MS Basic is unsuitable as a standard to measure anything by. > And if we're into basic, one should never forget the ABC-80 and subsequently > ABC-800 machines made by Luxor AB (Sweden). I think that ABC-800 had the best > performing basic I've ever seen on a 4MHz Z-80 system. Darn, this thing even > had built-in ISAM (essentially an indexable database table), and I've seen a > rather decently performing accounting package running on ABC-802 hooked to a > central file storage server (it was CatNet if anybody would know of such a > thing). In comparison to ABC-Basic, the standard stuff that came with e.g. > ZX-Spectrum, or Amstrad CPCxxxx felt like as fast as running a LyX compile on > a 486 system :) > > Just imagine a system with about 64kb of RAM, running an interpreter, having a > built-in *auto-indenting* editor, and booting in about 15s (the time it took > for the CRT to warm-up). Yes, that's OS-9 / Basic09 on a green-screen Nokia :-) ... > Cheers, Kuba Ober > Cheers Martin
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