SynthModules

You bring back fond memories.  My first programming was on a PDP-8
and then later an 8008. I was so happy when I upgraded to an 8080. 
It was a wire-wrapped set of cards (a bunch of cards!).  I ran many a
'Tiny Basic' in 2K of ram.  I remember upgrading the luxury of
Microsoft's 16k basic but most of my code was assembly.  I had a ODT
(showing my age for any of you old DEC programmers) which would load
programs via paper tape and offer a debugging environment.  I finally
upgraded to dual cassettes and then to the luxury of dual 8"
floppies.  I spent big bucks to upgrade to 48K of ram.  It drove a
Tektronix 4010 DVST which was quite cool, though.  A couple of us
eventually ported CP/M and had quite the machine for programming in
the mid '70's.  A home-built 300 baud modem allowed remote file
exchange WITHOUT paper tape!

But I digress ...
Dave

--- In SynthModules@yahoogroups.com, "grantrichter2001"
<grichter@a...> wrote:
> Remeber that in basic, ALL variables are global. There are no 
> "local" variables, so every variable HAS to have a unique 
> identifier and can not be reused between subroutines. One of 
> the simple disciplines to handle this is to start all "local" 
> variables for each sub-routine with a letter. Like Alist, Aindex, 
> Alocal, next subroutine is Blist, Bindex, Blocal etc.
> 
> Brute force, yes, but Basic was developed for small bitwidth 
> machines and small memory spaces. The Tiny Basic interpreter 
> is only 2K of 8 bit wide space. Elegant in it's own minimalist way.
> 
> Now that hardware has become stupidly cheap, there is no point 
> in conserving resources. But at one time computers only had 4K 
> of "core" ha,ha,ha, "core" memory yuck, yuck, "drum" memory 
> ha,ha, ha, punch cards ha, ha, ha, choke, cough, gasp...
> 
> OK I'll shut up now...