Remix clone Hacker News

Also, though, how big was Apple Integer BASIC? As I understand it, you had an entire PDP-10 at your disposal when you wrote the Fortran version of Empire.

▲

WalterBright 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I did learn how to program on the -10. A marvelous experience.

Looking backwards, writing an integer basic is a trivial exercise. But back in the 70s, I had no idea how to write such a thing.

Around 1978, Hal Finney (yes, that guy) wrote an integer basic for the Mattel Intellivision (with its wacky 10 bit microprocessor) that fit in a 2K EPROM. Of course, Hal was (a lot) smarter than the average bear.

	▲	kragen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting, I didn't know that! I didn't know him until the 90s, and didn't meet him in person until his CodeCon presentation. What I was trying to express—perhaps poorly—is that maybe floating-point support would have been more effort than the entire Integer BASIC. (Incidentally, as I understand it, nobody has found a bug in Apple Integer BASIC yet, which makes it a nontrivial achievement from my point of view.)