3 ms·
I don't think there was a better language for 8 bit micros. It was line oriented so you didn't need an editor. It was simple and had a very short learning curv
by forinti 3y ago
I don't think there was a better language for 8 bit micros.
It was line oriented so you didn't need an editor. It was simple and had a very short learning curve.
You were never going to write a huge program, so modules or packages weren't a necessity.
It just fit this niche perfectly.
- karmakaze 3y agoOne really cool thing Atari Basic did was that you could list lines x,y and just move your cursor up to the line you wanted to change and insert/delete/overtype characters. It would even handle line-wrapping of the logical line up to 3 physical lines. Press enter and that's the new line (or change the line number and it's a new source line). It was often used for renumbering a few lines to make room for more as there was no built-in renumber utility.
- zozbot234 3y agoFORTH was the closest competitor. Perhaps it could have worked well enough if it was extended with custom parsing modes for infix arithmetic and for printing out floating point numbers, which were the main poimts where even minimal versions of BASIC were genuinely more user-friendly than FORTH.