Arthur's LISP in BASIC | Hacker News Reader

Arthur's LISP in BASIC

cs.rit.edu

31 pointsbrudgers6 comments

I remember writing my own adventure game in Basic, but with only 8KB of RAM on my PET computer, I ran out of space after only 6 rooms.

Personally, I don't have a lot of nostalgia for those days. I have no idea how I ever persisted with such primitive tools. Looking at Arthur's Basic code just makes me feel bad, for both my and his former selves.

I don't remember anywhere near enough basic to try answering my own question, but: BROKENHEART. What?

In SICP's stop-and-copy garbage collector that was the tag on a forwarding pointer from the from-space to the to-space. Since this was written after SICP 1st edition came out, I'd guess that's the source.

> That was a bug in Atari BASIC that I never tracked down.

Never assume it was a bug in BASIC. A bug indicates it was a mistake. Very often code of that age had "tricks" to workaround hardware/limited resources that could be perceived as a bug when it kept something else from happening as intended, but it was required. That is the difference between a hacker then and one today- they didn't bitch and complain about bugs, they just made it work. I know you were coding back then- I was too, but I have a feeling you weren't well versed with the ins and outs of how BASIC interpreters of the time were written from reading things in your blog like:

"I’m not a programmer. Or a hardware guru. I’ve come to believe myself the amateur anthropologist. I like rummaging through the midden mound of the techpress reading what the tribespeople have to say. I’m bookish."

> That is the difference between a hacker then and one today- they didn't bitch and complain about bugs, they just made it work.

Since I personally heard Sussman & Ableson bitch about how awful Basic was, I'll have to say that you are wrong in this regard.

Of course, they wouldn't have been bitching about the bugs in Basic, per se. They would have been asserting that Basic is a bug.

Basic is obviously not a bug. It is the reason many of us got started, and Atari Basic is no exception. My point was that people that speak of bugs of software, OS's, language interpreters, etc. of that time have no clue how difficult it was to write them get them to do all of the things they needed to do. Ridiculous I got downvoted for that. Pfft.

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