Re: Wanted: Applesoft BASIC files

["Bryan Villados" <news002@macgeek.org>]

Well, I sort of agree on the spirit of what Bill mentioned, but I have a
different recommendation. One complaint about BASIC in general is its
openness to people writing bad code. BASIC doesn't encourage unstructured
programming, but at the same time it doesn't penalize the programmer either.
In a software engineering class, I would not have imagined that BASIC would
still make an appearance today.

Instead of a BASIC intepreter, how about designing a totally new language
and write an intepreter to support it? In my software engineering class
about 15 years ago, we took an article out of Scientific American and wrote
our own "red code" interpeter, which basically looks like assembler but a
lot less opcodes. An article describing this can be found at:

http://ai-depot.com/ArtificialLife/Programmer-Perspective.html

And once the interpreter is finished, you could create a Core Wars
tournament like my class did, and have all the students develop programs to
fight each other.

--- Bryan

"Bill Garber" <willy46pa@comcast.net> wrote in message
WgCdnXKvkMdMRfajXTWcrg@comcast.com">news:WgCdnXKvkMdMRfajXTWcrg@comcast.com...
>
> My thought is, since the AppleSoft Basic Interpreter has
> already been developed, why not have them create their
> very own Basic Interpreter, AND write the Basic programs
> to suit their own Interpreter to test on it. This way they won't
> have the chance to take any of the AppleSoft code and insert
> it into their Interpreter. That would be a better scale to test their
> abilities on. ;-)
>
> Bill @ GarberStreet Enterprises
> http://garberstreet.netfirms.com
>
>
> Ellen Spertus <spertus@mills.edu> wrote in message
> 4d72a8e7.0303090421.fc57d18@posting.google.com">news:4d72a8e7.0303090421.fc57d18@posting.google.com...
> > I'm teaching a software engineering class and am planning to have the
> > students write an Applesoft BASIC interpreter as their final project.
> > I'm looking for BASIC programs that they can use to test the
> > interpreter and have fun with it.  I have found many disk image files
> > online but relatively few BASIC programs in ASCII or tokenized format
> > (which I can convert).  I do not have access to an Apple II so could
> > not read Apple floppies.  Can anyone point me to or give me any
> > collections?  I may even be able to pay a small amount.
>
>
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