Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: mixed nuts Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer,alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk Subject: Re: And this is what is called a SPANK Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 08:17:47 -0400 Organization: Somewhat Lines: 34 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: A9as3CUk4FPY6Uz4/ZktLg.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:16144 glen herrmannsfeldt wrote: > In comp.lang.java.programmer Nadegda wrote: > (snip, someone wrote) > >>>Wow, even the name is pointlessly abbreviated to be missing one vowel. >>>Does it date back to when machines had a few KB of core and even one >>>byte of extra computer code could be a storage problem? > >>Of course not. Not that that would have been an excuse even so. The old >>Commodore VIC-20 had a BASIC interpreter and that language had full, >>readable keywords like PRINT rather than abbreviated garbage like, say, >>PRN. Commodore employed a clever trick: BASIC programs were stored (on >>disk and in memory) *compressed*, with all of the common keywords >>replaced with graphics characters with the high bit set. > > The HP TSB2000 (Time Shared BASIC) systems did that, too. > > Not only that, it would refuse to allow you to enter a statement > that didn't pass some syntax checks. > > Many of the microcomputer BASIC interpreters were based on > the ones from Microsoft, but even if not, the tokenizing compression > was well known by then. > > Not only does it save memory, but the interpreter runs a lot faster! > The tokenizing is done only once, not each time the statement > is executed. > You can make BASIC programs run lots faster if you delete comments and replace the GOSUBes with GOTOes -- Grizzly H.