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The source code is 213 KB of ASCII, assembled on 1980-8-6. A souped-up Apple II at that time would have had 64 KB of RAM, and 140 KB of storage per floppy disk. I guess you needed a PDP-11 to do any real work in those days.
6502 assembly is so nice, I wrote some apps in the early 80's. You can learn the language in a few minutes. But all sorts of interesting clever things were possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the GP, but here's my perspective learning programming in a 3-year technical high school program in Brazil (I had a little bit of exposure before, with Windows batch files and shell scripts). We started with a language called Portugol or "structured Portuguese" which is something like a formalized pseudo-code language and was used to teach the basic concepts of structured programming: variables, control flow,…
Seems a shame that there wasn't a Portugol interpreter/compiler handy to at least see things running on a machine before moving to C. Probably would have been a good class assignment to more advanced students to build something like that.
The source code is 213 KB of ASCII, assembled on 1980-8-6. A souped-up Apple II at that time would have had 64 KB of RAM, and 140 KB of storage per floppy disk. I guess you needed a PDP-11 to do any real work in those days.
Per the link, the file was editted and built on a PDP-10 running ITS, which was a 36 bit machine with an 18 bit address space.
Interestingly, almost everything else I've seen from ITS uses the 6 bit upper-case-only encoding. This is pretty clearly ASCII.
I'm asking because of reaperducer's comment from just a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18086566
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If you don't mind me asking, did the book do any explaining of why the magic computer words were in a foreign language (English)? Had you been exposed to much English already when you picked up the book? As a native English speaker I feel fairly ignorant of how programming is taught in other (human) languages. I recall a quote [1] by Eric S. Raymond commenting (or perhaps speculating?) that Linus commented his kernel…
I'm not the GP, but here's my perspective learning programming in a 3-year technical high school program in Brazil (I had a little bit of exposure before, with Windows batch files and shell scripts). We started with a language called Portugol or "structured Portuguese" which is something like a formalized pseudo-code language and was used to teach the basic concepts of structured programming: variables, control flow,…
This is wonderful! My first paid programming job was writing a Logo Adventure program for C64 Terrapin Logo. They wanted a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing capabilities, and I just used Logo's top level interpreter as the parser! That saved a lot of coding, but it did let you cheat (aka "learn to understand and program and debug Logo"). https://medium.com/@donhopkins/logo-adventure-for…
> SYNSTAX ... A STACK OF SYNTAX PROPERTIES
If there were a "stupid-clever variable names" hall of fame, that one would certainly make the cut.