New answers tagged basic
2
I tested that with an emulator and it appears that the Oric basic (coded Microsoft) accepts lines from 0 to 63999
Trying to create a line number 64000 (hex 0xFA00) results in a syntax error.
The Oric Atmos manual confirms this on page 15:
The line number may be any integer (whole number) up to 63999
Some comments in the Oric disassembled rom seem to ...
2
Donald Alcock's, who treats "the need for portability as an axiom", wrote in Illustrating BASIC (Cambridge University Press, 1977):
5
I have actually looked into this in some depth. All major variations of BASIC that I can find source for store the line number as an int.
This includes even Tiny BASIC, which used a single unsigned byte, as one could not type a program with 255 lines into their target machines (4k total memory) anyway. All others that I have looked at - Altair, MS 6502, ...
5
BBC BASIC V, as used on the Acorn Archimedes, had a maximum line number of 65279 according to Matt Godbolt's analysis of the tokenised file format.
Each line is stored as a sequence of bytes:
0x0d [line num hi] [line num lo] [line len] [data...]
The line number
is as you’d expect — the line number — with one exception. The maximum
line number is ...
4
According to Z BASIC Interactive BASIC Compiler [170 page, 2MB PDF] (or this 772 page, 32MB version, from which quotes below are taken), the Z BASIC Interpreter (which seemed to be available for MS-DOS, APPLE, Macintosh, CP/M and TRS-80 Models 1,3 and 4), has a maximum line number of 65,534 (and the minimum is 0):
The Standard Line Editor requires each ...
11
On the original Dartmouth Time-Sharing BASIC (circa 1964), the maximum line number was 99999.
Dartmouth Time-Sharing ran on a hybrid Datanet-30 / GE 235 system. The Datanet-30 could communicate with up to 128 terminals at once, and handled the I/O. The GE 235 was better at computation and was responsible for executing the BASIC programs.
99999+1 was the ...
20
With so many different implementations of BASIC a comprehensive answer is difficult. So here's the limits for TRS-80 Model I and III BASIC (written by Microsoft).
Line numbers are stored as a two byte word but the largest allowed by the input routines is 65529. Primarily because this is an easier limit to test rather than checking for overflow. The line ...
22
The answer is pretty straightforward:
65535 is for BASICs, which can handle number lines as an unsigned integer (2 bytes wide)
BASICs, which handles two-byte integers as "signed", usually have the line number limit 32767 (highest positive number). Those BASICs often have the "negative addresses" for POKEs and PEEKs, i.e. "POKE -1247,10" etc.
Sinclair ZX ...
8
I have a full collection of 1978 and 1979 PCW magazines.
The Benchmark Tests are documented in Vol. 1 No. 1 under the article "Direct Addressing: Where to get your Personal computer". The November issue is simply a report of showing the results of benchmark times that were submitted from contributors that ran the programs listed in issue 1.
The following ...
0
MERGE and the Cassette Buffer File/Tape Buffer
Many or most versions of BASIC on these machines would have had a "Cassette Buffer File/Tape Buffer", and many would also have had a command like MERGE .
. . .So maybe the commands OPEN "CAS: PROGRAM" FOR OUTPUT AS #1 and PRINT #1,"10 PRINT 1"or one of the Save to Cassette commands could write a program ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
