hoard-of-gwbasic

GW-BASIC, and probably other MS BASICs, only looked up destination lines once, then replaced the GOTO code with a direct pointer to the destination. Something similar may have been used for other symbols, but I don't remember for sure? Guess the ZX BASIC did not do that, or it would have improved the measurements seen in the article? BLUE Book of GW-BASIC is full of details and tricks like that and some of it probably is useful for other BASICs as well. https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

If anyone wants to do this in DOS, one thing I learned from the 1991 BLUE Book is that BLOAD can be used to load a binary file straight to graphics card memory. https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic There was a site hosting the author's freeware utilities (now only on the web archive?), and one is a graphics editor made for that purpose ("EBS: Screen editor for BLOAD pages"): https://web.archive.org/web/20060410121551/http://scottserve... From a quick search BLOAD is available in Commodore BASIC as well. Would be interesting to hear how it compares to the optimized loop that PRINTs the image, if the same trick works on a C64? * No... BLOAD was added in some later version, e.g. for C128, not any of the versions running on C64 https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/BASIC_7.0#Commodore_BASIC_Comm... ... But I guess the speed of reading a fe

There is a chapter in the Blue Book about how the GW-BASIC byte code is structured, and from what I understand it used pointers to lines, not just offsets? But I did not look too carefully (guess the answer is in the source code: https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC). That book is full of interesting facts and fun low-level tricks for (GW-)BASIC programming. Available for download here: https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic Before reading that I never considered how primitive early BASICs were. There is a lot of linear-searching for things (variables, line-numbers) that has to be considered when optimizing.

One thing that made an impression on me when reading the 1991 Blue Book About GW-BASIC (1991) earlier this year was the chapter on making a text-mode user interface, that recommended drawing a characters+attributes interface 80x25 using an external editor, save that as a raw 4 kB file, and then from the BASIC program just BLOAD the file straight into graphics memory to render the screen in one line. Everything is so much easier when you have standardized hardware instead of layers upon layers of abstractions supporting all sorts of weird things, like we have to put up with this century. https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

Currently reading The BLUE Book About GW-BASIC and QuickBasic (Thomas C. McIntire, 1991, https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic). It is full of fascinating and somewhat horrible advice. For rendering text-mode user interfaces the author recommends having a ~4000 bytes binary file saved that is just BLOADed straight from disk into graphics RAM (in text-mode that sets all the text and attributes/colors for the screen). Tricks like that would probably never cross my mind, being used to having to load some library to draw anything to a screen. I discovered just some day ago pc-basic is a really impressive project. pip install pcbasic gives you a portable python-implementation of essentially GW-BASIC, running in a terminal or graphics window. But you can of course also grab the MIT-licensed GW-BASIC 1.0 that Microsoft released a few y