Tag: BASIC09

(Apologies to Tom T. Hall; I couldn’t resist, and it leaves room for a followup.) Recently a gentleman asked me whether I have a CoCo 3 (more formally, a TRS-80 Color Computer 3). He was curious about whether I could run a couple of benchmarks both in Color BASIC and in BASIC09. I do have a CoCo 3, but I…

I’ve repeatedly referred to I-code in previous articles. Let’s go into some more detail, and in passing correct a mistaken impression I may have given. What distinguishes I-code from other virtual machine code As you enter, edit, or load source code with basic09, it is converted to I-code. I-code is commonly likened to code for virtual machines, like the JVM…

What programmers debated in the old days Nowadays people argue about object-oriented versus functional programming or dynamic versus static typing. But back in the day, it was all about structured programming. The brouhaha started with a letter E.W. Dijkstra wrote and which was published in Communications of the ACM in March of 1968 under the title “Go To Statement Considered Harmful“….

Allen Huffman is graciously sharing ways to speed up programs written for the family of Microsoft BASIC interpreters common on personal computers of the time that interests us, including the various flavors of Color BASIC. These ways all boil down to Modify your code to work around the limitations the BASIC interpreter inherited from its origins on systems with extremely…