[Coco] a désigne document about BASIC for the 8080 & 6800- Microsoft

[Johann Klasek]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 05:59:04AM -0500, James Jones wrote:
> As Mr. Evans says, limited resources just about forces an interpreter. The
> sad part is that the interpreter persisted after the constraints were gone,
> leaving people without reasonable control or data structures, without local
> variables, and having to contort their code (packing as much as possible on
> each line because line numbers use up memory, finagling variable references
> so that the interpreter's linear search symbol table lookup didn't take
> quite as long on frequently-referenced variables) to deal with the
> interpreter's limitations--though none of that got rid of the overhead of
> having to interpret each statement each time it was executed. 

This hits the point pefectly. The programmer is forced to "play" as a
human BASIC optimizer (felt this so often)... something that could be
accomplished automatically. A step further, a BASIC compiler goes to far
in my opinion (for several practical reasons).

> (Didn't
> people also store numeric values in variables to avoid making the
> interpreter rescan and reconvert them from text over and over?)

Yes! But there is a floating limit on which a number constant is better
to be stored in a variable and depends on the number of digits and the
position in the variable table. For sure a neat computational challenge. :)