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Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

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Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#121

Post by scarface74 »

flomo wrote: post #97
scarface74 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz didn’t create “Apple Basic”. He created the first version of BASIC on the Apple // - Integer Basic. But Microsoft wrote the next version AppleSoft Basic.

Sorry to sperg, but "Integer BASIC" was almost certainly a retronym, a term which didn't exist prior to AppleSoft. Originally it was probably called Apple BASIC, just like ever other [manufacturer] BASIC (at least colloquially).

From the best I can tell, it was always referred to as Integer Basic and never “Apple Basic”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_BASIC

I do know that it was referred to that as far back as 1980. I’ve never seen a reference to it as “Apple Basic” and I had an Apple //e in 1986.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#122

Post by qwkudhq »

justinjlynn wrote: post #93
vasco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps out of place but why are you consistently calling Woz "they"? I'm not a native speaker and it sounds very weird.

As I'm not aware of what pronouns they personally prefer, I fall back to using the singular, gender-neutral, "they/them/their". It's a fairly new usage in colloquial English but I find it to be common enough so as to not impair understanding.

This is ideological idiocy. Please get lost.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#123

Post by iainmerrick »

I was always very impressed by the floating point routines in BBC Basic (also on the 6502). Anyone know who wrote those, and if they were derived from this work by Rankin and Wozniak?

BBC Basic is the best all-round Basic of its era that I know of, with rich control flow features, proper recursion and built-in assembler. But I don't know how much was original work from Acorn and how much was borrowed from elsewhere. Are there any other 8-bit Basics that are especially good?

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#124

Post by xnaj »

justinjlynn wrote: post #93
vasco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps out of place but why are you consistently calling Woz "they"? I'm not a native speaker and it sounds very weird.

As I'm not aware of what pronouns they personally prefer, I fall back to using the singular, gender-neutral, "they/them/their". It's a fairly new usage in colloquial English but I find it to be common enough so as to not impair understanding.

"They" sounds like a person has multiple personality disorder, so Woz might be offended by the usage.

Actually Stallman has arrived at this conclusion independently (see the bottom of this link):

https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#125

Post by cmrdporcupine »

WalterBright wrote: post #49
paulsmith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to hear more about this - have you written on your experiences?

No, and sadly I've lost the code I wrote, I don't know what happened to it. Anyhow, programming an 8 bit 6800 for an embedded controller means keeping track of 6 or more things going on at the same time, while modern software focuses on one thing at a time and isolating it from everything else. Those things include the contents of each register, the stack level, the size of the code, interrupts going off, polling tha…

If you think about it, it's pretty crazy. Register allocation using graph colouring is an NP-complete problem. Writing assembler by hand, one is doing this constantly in one's head, and often with better results than a compiler would do.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#126

Post by barrkel »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #109
bigred100 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why rich people have such a high urge to fly small airplanes. It seems to expose you to a lot of risk, which you could easily avoid (I’ve lived a considerable number of years without facing a single situation where I was likely to fly an airplane).

Airplanes are a great hobby for people who need to get out of the office, love traveling, and need a hobby that has a lot of little detailed things to stay on top of. Flying real IMC to minimums in a small plane is like solving a real-time fluid dynamics/trig problem, where if you fail, you die. I guess there are people who do it for the danger, but the beauty of it is that you can get really down in the details and…

Once you really master the game, your biggest danger is yourself: get-there-itis, sloppy preflights, pushing things a little at a time, getting away with them, then pushing more, and so on.

Normalization of deviance, for people interested in the literature.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#127

Post by xnaj »

foldr wrote: post #117
bsaul wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« One reason to do so may be to explicitly normalise the usage so it doesn't imply a value judgement » That’s some scary sentence here. so gender is now a « judgment ». Like, there’s no reason to assume because steve wozniak has all the physical characteristics of a male, and has always been called « mister », using « he » (which is the grammatically correct way of designing a male human in the english language by de…

It looks as though you're just looking for an excuse to go on a pre-packaged rant about gender and sex. I find it scary that an innocuous use of singular "they" (which has been in use as long as English as existed) would provoke such a thing.

While it is true that occasionally singular "they" has been used carefully in some special cases, the default usage in the post we're discussing would have led to hilarity and bewilderment.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#128

Post by iamtheworstdev »

rbanffy wrote: post #111
crftr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a free afternoon I would recommend booking a "discovery flight" at a flight school. You go up, with a certified instructor, and learn the fundamental controls in a relatively safe environment. It can be an interesting experience, even if you have no desire to become a licensed pilot.

I checked that and around here (in Ireland) it's about €200 for a short flight. How is that in the US?

I think mine was $50 a few years ago. They're usually hoping you like it enough to take lessons where they will recoup the cost.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#129

Post by xnaj »

foldr wrote: post #117
bsaul wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« One reason to do so may be to explicitly normalise the usage so it doesn't imply a value judgement » That’s some scary sentence here. so gender is now a « judgment ». Like, there’s no reason to assume because steve wozniak has all the physical characteristics of a male, and has always been called « mister », using « he » (which is the grammatically correct way of designing a male human in the english language by de…

It looks as though you're just looking for an excuse to go on a pre-packaged rant about gender and sex. I find it scary that an innocuous use of singular "they" (which has been in use as long as English as existed) would provoke such a thing.

The only people who are constantly rubbing their sexuality in other people's faces online are the "50-different-pronouns" proponents.

Re: Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502

#130

Post by cmrdporcupine »

natashabaker wrote: post #19
dev_dull wrote: post #5

> They took the limitations of their computers as a challenge, sat down, and made these tiny machines do impressive things. Poets knew from long ago that using pentameter and constraints fosters creativity. Here we see the same principle applied in computing.

This is what I love about the C256 project ( https://c256foenix.com/ ). From an interview with her: By limiting its resources, future developers will have to be clever to find new ways to create amazing things that early on we thought we could never do. Memory is cheap, so I could easily spend the same amount of money on a single chip that could have given me the chance to fill the memory space with RAM. But instead,…

If you haven't, order a Rev C board and contribute!

https://c256foenix.com/product/c256-foenix-rev-c-bare-board-...

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