Re: BASIC

Rick D wrote:

Payton Byrd wrote:
<snip>
MMG is supposed to convert to machine language, but all I have heard is
all of the bugs.


It does output assembly language but it defaults to deleting the files. I can't remember offhand what the procedure was to get it to save the files. I recall they took up so much room on the disk that it was near impossible to save them and not get an out of space disk error.

They were interesting in their simplicity and execution. Everything was passing parameters and jumping to a line number or precompiled routine in the ~4k runtime package. IIRC ~ RPN type evaluation of line and every line number became a label to jump to i.e. 10 PRINT "Hello" would first translate to something like

L10
V1
.byte 'H
.byte 'e
.byte 'l
.byte 'l
.byte 'o
.byte EOL
LDA >V10
PHA
LDA <V10
PHA
JSR <somewhere in RT with canned code to print>
If you had a GOTO or GOSUB anywhere else in the program, it would just JSR/JMP L10 since it is an assembler variable.

I never noticed any bugs but the runtime was canned code interpretation of what the BASIC code would do. Most stuff worked really close to what you expected but I do recall an oddity or two.

Rick
.