>This gets at the heart of the dual nature of Batari Basic. Is it a
>Basic adhering as closely as possible to the old 8bit Basics some of
>us grew up on, or is it an efficient way of writing assembly, that
>happens to use Basic syntax? (A floor wax or a dessert topping, so to
>geek...errr, speak.)
Well, my initial idea came from what I remember about TI 99/4 BASIC. Not
the extended BASIC, the one that came with the machine. For those who never
used it, it was very watered-down, and actually a little annoying to use.
But its simplicity gave me the idea that such a thing would be easy to
compile, and that I could create a BASIC-like language that was not too far
off from writing in assembly directly.
Initially, I was going to keep if-then statements simple, like if
(condition) then (linenumber) just like TI BASIC. But after coding this in,
I remembered how much I hated this about TI BASIC, and figured out that
"then (statement)" wouldn't be that much harder to do after all (with a
little recursion of sorts :) I also originally didn't allow colons, but
then I realized that this wasn't hard either, just keep parsing until no
more colons are found. To be honest, the hardest thing about writing the
compiler was the 2600's kernel!
>Combining that with the whole issue of some
>things just aren't going to be feasible or at least easy for you to
>code, and also your desire to keep it dead simple to use the basic
>initial kernal for a simple game, and you have some tough design
>decisions ahead of you.
The simpler, the better.
"A man's gotta know his limitations." - Dirty Harry
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