4 ms·
What version of Basic were you using that lacked FOR? Even the shitty one crammed into my Sinclair ZX80 had FOR.
by egypturnash 5y ago
What version of Basic were you using that lacked FOR? Even the shitty one crammed into my Sinclair ZX80 had FOR.
- klyrs 5y agoOh, I can't say that it didn't. But I was only 7, and more amused by things like 10 PRINT "POOP" 20 GOTO 10 than, what, reading a non-existant manual? My parents weren't programmers, so I learned by stumbling in the dark. But, you've got me curious. I recall using BASICA, GWBASIC and QBASIC -- reading over their respective histories, I'd have gotten my start on BASICA on a hand-me-down 286. I'm not finding good docs on the language, but a familiar program [1] uses FOR loops -- so they were supported. But I distinctly recall hand-rolling a for-equivalent loop with GOTO and IF, counting down to zero. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130918210121/http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/donkey.bas.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20130918210121/http://www.coding...
- egypturnash 5y agoMore visually pleasing, and several keystrokes shorter, for rapid input on an unattended store demo machine: 10 print "poop ";:run FWIW, the very first version of BASIC in 1964 supported FOR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC#First_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC#First_Edition). I never used DOS machines but https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC https://gunkies.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC claims that BASICA was based on Microsoft's BASIC, and that definitely had FOR. Young you must have arrived at the concept of a for loop without knowing there was a keyword in the language designed to support that, which is pretty cool!