[Coco] [Color Computer] pagetable.com > Blog Archive > Bill Gates' Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit

[Shain Klammer]

Both the apostrophe and question mark proceed any micro... I'm fairly sure
that EDUSystem 25 BASIC and OS/8 BASIC (on the PDP family of minis, circa
late 60's to early 70's) had them.

The Dartmouth College manual from Oct 64 (developed for a GE225) doesn't
list any 'shortcuts'; but, is interesting that they slashed upper case ohs
and not zeros... http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/basic_oct64.pdf

I'd hoped to find some site showing the early evolution of BASIC commands
(like the shortcuts mentioned); but, haven't found any... it'd be
interesting.

sk

2008/10/2 Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu>

> PRINT and '?' both get tokenized to the single-byte token for the print
> command
> (which is different from the Ascii code for '?'.)  I'd guess PRINT got
> special
> treatment because of its frequent use in direct mode to print out the
> values of
> variables to aid in debugging.
>
> I'm pretty sure I recollect the question mark being used as a substitute
> for
> PRINT in various BASICs prior to the introduction of the CoCo.  I'm less
> certain
> about the apostrophe substitute for REM predating the CoCo, though I
> suspect it
> does.
>
> Art
>
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, John wrote:
>
> > Hello Art,
> >
> > Is this tokenization to one byte the functionality that provides
> "shortcuts"
> > like typing "?" for "PRINT" ?  I've always wondered why that one command
> had
> > such a shortcut.
> >
> > Just curious,
> > John
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com]
> On
> > Behalf Of Arthur Flexser
> > Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 12:06 AM
> > To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> > Subject: Re: [Coco] [Color Computer] pagetable.com > Blog Archive > Bill
> > Gates' Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit
> >
> > All CoCo commands are tokenized to a single byte.  (Functions, to
> > distinguish
> > them from commands, use two bytes.)  This excludes commands like SAVEM,
> in
> > which
> > the "M" essentially acts as an argument to the SAVE command, which is
> > efficient
> > for saving ROM space and adds negligibly to execution time.
> >
> > Art
> >
> > On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, James Diffendaffer wrote:
> > >
> > > The Dragon's interpreter is faster than the CoCo's.
> > > That alone should tell you the CoCo's Basic wasn't optimized well.
> > > They didn't even bother to worry about what tokens were one or two
> > > bytes.  The most commonly used commands should have used single byte
> > > tokens but not all do.
> > >
> >
> >
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