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They were also how you edited your program in the absence of a coding editor. You'd type LIST to see your current program, type a new line with the same number
by a_e_k 1y ago
They were also how you edited your program in the absence of a coding editor. You'd type LIST to see your current program, type a new line with the same number to replace an existing line, or a new line with a new number to insert it numerically, etc.
- femto 1y agoAnd it was an absolute pain if you had to insert a new statement, but didn't have enough space left between line numbers. You had to retype the offending lines with new line numbers.
- musicale 1y agoDartmouth BASIC had a renumber command. I believe that line renumbering commands and/or utilities were commonly available for microcomputer BASICs as well.
- femto 1y agoSome BASICs had a RENUM command. They were a bit of a pain as well. As you wrote your program you got to know which line numbers were associated with which statements. Doing a RENUM meant having to relearn the "meaning" of each line number. I'm pretty sure my VZ-200 didn't have the RENUM command.
- michaelcampbell 1y agoSadly Atari BASIC did not. I can't recall if the Apple ][ BASIC had it built in, or if Beagle Brothers utility software could do it, but it was possible somehow.
- mrandish 1y agoYes, most Microsoft ROM BASICs at least 8K in size had the renum command. It was still a pain because you had to figure out the start, end and skip values.
- ahonhn 1y agoCommon practice was to increment line numbers by 10 instead of 1. Would give a bit of wiggle room to add more lines in later without having to renumber everything else.
- musicale 1y agoDartmouth BASIC was designed for teletype-style, hard-copy printing terminals, rather than video displays. Conveniently your whole session was printed out, so you could take your email and program listing home with you. Line-by line editing was practical for printing terminals, and line-by-line I/O scaled well across multiple terminals on a timesharing system. Line editing also worked well on microcomputers with cursor movement (like the C64) - you could edit code in place just by overtyping and hitting "return" for the appropriate line. On a slightly unrelated note, teletypes date back to the 19th century telegraph (and typewriter) era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
- genewitch 1y agoAnd still exist and are heavily used today, RTTY is built into most HF radios, and most militaries still use radio teletype, but encrypted and often at a different bandwidth. AX.25 and qpsk didn't manage to replace it.