On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 5:22 PM, Harold Hallikainen
<harold@hallikainen.com>wrote:

> Around that time or a little later, I licensed a 6800 Basic interpreter
> (very similar to the 6502) from Microsoft (then a partnership - my license
> was signed by William Gates, partner). I used this in a couple products.
>

Nice! Probably that worth something for the collectors?

The Wikipedia article discusses interesting features of the language
> implementation. During program entry, line numbers were converted to 16
> bit binary. This was followed by a byte representing the length of the
> tokenized line. All key words were replaced by single byte tokens. Strings
>
...

Yep, sometimes that's why I say .NET is no more than Applesoft Basic...
Tokenized language (MSIL), garbage collector (also was in Applesoft Basic),
so the main idea is the same :-)

and numeric literals remained in ASCII. The tokens were used to index into
> a jump table to handle the interpretation of the key word on program
> execution. As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, GOTO and GOSUB to a line
>

I wrote few things BTW that used assembly blocks, as you could know where
the Basic would store your binary data -- bit of hack but worked perfectly.
Then you could use the Basic's API from ROM to make things simpler :-)

I wish Apple was just as open nowadays.
Anyway, good old days :-)

Tamas
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