New answers tagged basic
4
[Uncle Bod's answer nails it. Vote for him. This is more of a background add on.]
The underlying issue is a hodgepodge of language and number mixup, further complicated by using a different notation when thinking about the problem (writing the question) as the one used within the code written.
In the question the OP asks about 0x9FFF vs. 0xA000, which is a ...
11
Without reading the manuals it seems that both vasm and tasm decides if an operand is a number or a label is decided from the first character. A number MUST start with a digit in the decimal range, anything starting with a letter is considered a label. So you need to enter the number as '0A000H'.
So, when tasm finds an argument A000H it thinks it a label ...
7
BASIC was originally developed on DTSS, which used Model 33 Teletypes for user I/O. The Model 33 didn't have [] characters, so BASIC couldn't use them.
2
The cheapest commonplace calculators in the 1970s could handle floating-point numbers 1.0 and larger with eight decimal digits of precision, and those smaller than 1.0 accurate to 0.0000001. A 32-bit floating-point format whose range extends through at least 1E20 will generally only be able to reliably process whole numbers in the range +/- 16,777,216, ...
10
A number of BASICs from the minicomputer era used []'s for array access. The most notable was HP Timeshare BASIC, which I assume inspired the other versions that used the same syntax. In HP, it was optional, and () and [] were synonymous. By convention, () was used for array access while [] was used for array and string slicing. This was by no means ...
15
The Minimal Basic Standard, ECMA-55, 1st Edition, January 1978, contains a very limited character set, only upper case, and very few non-alpha-numeric characters (including parenthesis, but no other brackets); certainly not the full ASCII character set.
This is likely due to compromises in the standards committee between corporate implementers of various ...
42
In the early days, many machines running BASIC had limited character sets. For example, the stock TRS-80 Model I couldn't display the lowercase portion of ASCII, which omitted curly-braces, tilde, and the vertical bar as well. Worse yet, the character codes that usually map to [ \ ] ^ instead mapped to up, down, left, and right arrow characters!
Reaching ...
25
I don't know about BASIC but it looks like that the same syntax is also used in BASIC
Because Visual BASIC is a BASIC?
Since the very first days of BASIC, arrays are indexed in parentheses and function parameters as well.
When Microsoft added user defined functions to BASIC (*1), they stayed with the existing syntax. A change in either would mean leaving ...
19
TL;DR:
The computer, or rather its OS, has no idea about a directory, in fact not even what constructs a file. It can only open/read/write/close data streams from devices on the bus. Getting a directory is a clever hack of 'loading' a dummy program. This works since
LOAD command is implemented as opening a data stream and loading what is returned into ...
0
Well, I have to dig out my coco in the seller Somewhere.
I also notice that there is a java Emulator.
I will install it on ubuntu. I included the link.
5
(Not a definite answer, just some information about the issues at work)
Might not be as easy as it seems.
For one, BASIC09 is, unlike most other BASICs a compiler, generating I-Code. In today's lingo one might call that a Bytecode. The code generated does not include all source information. For example procedure or variable names were replaced by their ...
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