Survey - what language are you coming from?

[Don Clugston]

Pragma wrote:
> Don Clugston wrote:
>> Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> Pragma wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I cut my teeth on C64 Basic*
>>> ...
>>>> (*I see that I'm not alone here - it's like those things were built 
>>>> to train new coders)
>>>
>>> I remember being so excited when the C64 magazines arrived in the 
>>> mail--a friend and I would spend all day entering the printed code to 
>>> play the new game they contained.  It wasn't my first experience with 
>>> programming, but it was certainly one of the most significant.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sean
>>
>> POKE 53280,0: POKE 53281,0
>> Those were the days.
>> A lot of my early programming was refactoring the code while typing it 
>> in because I was such a slow typist.
>>
>> I never used C64 BASIC much -- I switched to asm very quickly because 
>> it was higher level (!) I wrote my own editor/assembler, which let me 
>> have labels and variable names more than 2 characters long. It booted 
>> off a cassette drive in 15 seconds using a turboload routine (I was 
>> too poor to own a disk drive). It's still one of the programs I'm 
>> proudest of.
>>
> 
> 15 seconds?  Now *that's* impressive.  I recall waiting for some games 
> to load via tape that took 2-3 *minutes*.

I had a special 'leaderless' cassette, which didn't have the clear bit 
at the start. When saving it, I tricked the C64 into beginning to save 
immediately. To get the 15 seconds timing, you had to press 
shift-run/stop and PLAY on tape as soon as you flicked the power-on 
switch; you never saw the power-on screen. The turbo loader was saved 
inside the filename (filenames could be up to 500 bytes long). The 
editor/assembler itself was about 3K long, and it used primitive 
compression.

When saving a file, the code for saving was stored on the screen, which 
meant you could save from any part of RAM; but if you accidentally 
pressed {CLR/HOME} the C64 would crash once you hit RETURN, because 
you'd wiped out the code it was executing.