
Apple IIa – ROM for the Apple IIe That Compiles Basic (2018) - mariuz
https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/apple2a/
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tenebrisalietum
The writer wonders if a compiler would fit in 14K of ROM.

I remember, for the Commodore 64, in some old Compute! book, a compiler called
"Sprint" if my memory is correct.

This book featured programs you could type in using their program "MLX" (which
was a BASIC program you had to type in as well). "Sprint" was one of these.
The program was about 6K (it definitely was the biggest program in the book).

I never typed it in. I remember it having limitations, like considering all
variables integers and not supporting the DIM statement fully.

I'm not too familiar with BBC BASIC but my understanding was you could mix
6502 opcodes in with BASIC statements and basically do inline assembly. That
would seem to be the optimum strategy for old 8-bit computers that would have
to store the source and object code in as little as 64K or less of RAM.

\----------

> A NEXT, however, must check each time the stack of FOR statements to find
> the variable to increment and the line to jump to.

This is why on most BASICS we always left out the variable, most BASICs would
"automatically" loop to the outermost FOR.

~~~
ta-gazette22
Here is a link to Sprint published in Compute's Gazette from January 1986 --
[https://archive.org/details/1986-01-computegazette/page/n73](https://archive.org/details/1986-01-computegazette/page/n73)

Integer and string only, no parentheses (strict left to right evaluation),
array sizes were limited to 126 elements and one dimension, but longer
variable names. Converting a normal C= 64 program to work with it was
daunting.

This issue also has a machine language assembler, which I did use extensively.

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pjmlp
Regarding Basic compilers, there were plenty to choose from, and relatively
fast versus any other high level language, C only started to matter on 8 and
16 bit platforms, after UNIX started to gain market adoption.

Naturally an Amiga was much powerful as an Apple IIa, but stuff like AMOS did
wonders on the demoscene.

~~~
jacobush
I don't think hardly any demos were made with AMOS.

~~~
cr0sh
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but I owned a copy of AMOS and AMOS 3D
after it came out, and I certainly don't recall anybody using it for much that
I recall, other than a few homebrew games and such. Certainly not any demos I
ran across.

That said, last week I went on a spree looking up AMOS - and interestingly, I
found that the author released it as open source a while back, and recently
released a new cross-platform language that supposedly is AMOS compatible
(IIRC), and open source too. I think he had a patreon or something to sponsor
it's development:

[https://www.amos2.org/](https://www.amos2.org/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_\(programming_language\))

Though the wikipedia article mentions a few commercial games that were made
with it...

Anyhow - via finding that, and some other searching, I found that there is
still an active AMOS community out there. I'm not sure I need another BASIC-
ish retro-language in my repertoire, but I find it fascinating nonetheless!

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chungus
Recently I found out John Romero does a podcast where he speaks about Apple II
at great length, you can find it at appletimewarp.libsyn.com

Very interesting and entertaining podcast.

~~~
acomjean
Very interesting.. Though very infrequently updated.

Snakebyte used low res graphics to do collision detection! I thought about
that sometime in the 80s but didn't learn assembler...

Thanks!

[http://appletimewarp.libsyn.com](http://appletimewarp.libsyn.com)

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jcadam
Cool. I got started programming in BASIC on the Apple ][ as a kid like a lot
of coders my age.

Sometimes I think about buying an old machine just for the nostalgia factor.

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RachelF
There were a few compilers for AppleSoft BASIC. The most well-known was
Microsoft's BASIC compiler. It could not handle arrays, though.

The original Integer BASIC that Woz & Co wrote was faster than AppleSoft, but
lacked much complexity. I never heard of a compiler for it.

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zwieback
My computer as a teen. I would literally stay up late reading the monitor ROM
listing and thinking Woz was some kind of super hero. Anything Apple did after
the ][ seemed like a betrayal to me (although I do own an iPod I love).

