lyricalnanoha wrote:
On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, Michael J. Mahon wrote:The Applesoft interpreter is a bit uneven in its quality. Some tradeoffs seem to have been carefully thought out, but parts of it look like a hurried conversion from another microprocessor.It was... it was ported over from the Z80.
Or perhaps even the 8080...but some ports are done with a much more subtle adaptation to the target architecture. In the case of 6502 Microsoft BASIC, it seems that it was more important that the port be completed quickly. It's interesting to consider the "path not taken", which would have been Woz completing the integration of floating-point into Integer BASIC. (Of course, this would have resulted in Apple BASIC being quite different from most micro BASICs.) -michael NadaNet 3.0 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."