4 ms·
As a kid I always wondered why my Amstrad computer turned all keywords in a listing to Uppercase... ... years later I figured out they were coding internally e
by eb0la 10y ago
As a kid I always wondered why my Amstrad computer turned all keywords in a listing to Uppercase...
... years later I figured out they were coding internally every basic keyword into a lookup table, thus saving your precious 64kb of RAM. The Spectrum did the same, but they didn't have to parse the strings: you had to type the correct key combination to actually write the sentence (does anyone remember spectrum k,l,c, and e cursor modes?)
- Doctor_Fegg 10y agoAnd speeding the program up, too: because each line had been tokenised on input, the interpreter's work at runtime was much less. I miss my Amstrad.