Re: Two friendly questions to Apple II users...

[dalloff@freenet.columbus.oh.us (Dave Althoff)]

Fabrice Frances (frances@ensica.fr) wrote:

: 3) Easier: names of variable aren't limited in length but only the first
: two characters are significative... right or wrong ?

Yes.  There is a theoretical limit of 238 characters, but that is the
length of the line buffer...and if the variable name contains an Applesoft
token, that will cause problems.

: 4) More technical: is there a microsoft signature in the code,
: consisting of the ascii characters !FTOSORCIM (Microsoft! backwards),
: but hidden as two floating point values after the floating point
: constants
: used for a polynomial (the one for computing TAN I think), that is to
: say,
: bits 6 and/or 7 of some bytes are inversed. One way to easily verify
: this:
: mask each byte with a $3F value, then add $40, and search FTOSORCIM... 

I did a quick check of the BASIC ROM in the ROM 01 IIgs (from
BASIC.SYSTEM).  I didn't try the byte-masking tactic, but the only
signature bytes I found...unencoded...were "Apple ][" and "F. Bachman".  
In the Enhanced //e, I found both "Apple ][" and "Apple //e" near the end
of the ROM listing...in fact, in similar locations (I didn't note the
actual byte positions).

--Dave Althoff, ][.
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