“I don’t doubt you but give a couple of examples. I’ve done a lot of assembly language which is probably what he used. “
The dissassembled version of his 4K BASIC is available on several sites and he HAD to do this in machine code with an assembler. One of the things that I thought was breakthrough was tokenizing the keywords in memory, which also buys error checking. Of course all great things are built from previous great things, and the trick of dumping the trig functions at startup in favor of more program memory was “stolen” from DEC’s PDP/8 FOCAL language, written in 1968 or 1969.
I’ve always thought it funny that he and Allen had to pay another programmer to do the floating point. I’ve actually written a floating point package myself but it almost killed me and I had to learn a lot more about binary mathematics than I wanted to :(
“tokenizing the keywords in memory, which also buys error checking.”
Not sure what that is. Is it the beginning of the linker concept that allows the output files of separate compilations to be combined into a single executable?
Today you can buy a microprocessor chip that has 64 bit floating point hardware, for less than $30.
The days of writing your own floating point, trig, compiler, linker, sorting, database, communications, etc., are long gone. Now the programmer uses or glues together or debugs enormous chunks of pre-written software. Not much fun for me.