[Coco] a désigne document about BASIC for the 8080 & 6800- Microsoft

[Theodore (Alex) Evans]

On 01/26/2016 09:52 AM, Salvador Garcia wrote:
>  Maybe in 1975 an interpreter made sense, but the technology should
> have returned to compilers once the needed resources were
> available. I believe that one aspect that doomed BASIC was that it
> was considered a toy language because it was interpreted. Still,
> this is a very interesting document. Thanks for sharing! Salvador

I think that even in 1980 an interpreter made sense.  Consider that my
first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1k RAM and 8k ROM.  Assuming
that a compiler for as useful and friendly a language as the BASIC
that was built in could be fit in the 8k along with a library to
effectively reduce the size of the object code, you still would have
been left with a much smaller program space given that you need to
have the source and object code in memory at the same time. Especially
when you are talking about a cassette based system.  A base CoCo 1
with 4k RAM and 8k ROM (Color BASIC) has the same issue, though it is
not as severe.  Even the base IBM PC released in 1981 and costing
$1565 only had 16k RAM and relied on a cassette for storage.

By 1985, when the resources aren't so constrained, the newer computers
rely on library routines in ROM and a system that you boot into.

Yes, by the time you have a 64k machine with a floppy drive a compiler
is a better choice, but that wasn't the base configuration for
machines until well after the introduction of the CoCo.