12 Nov
2003
12 Nov
'03
9:20 a.m.
ENTER also accepts input without printing a "?" for a
prompt. I don't think there was a way to stop INPUT from printing a "?"
every time.
correct!!
ed sharpe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Schickel" <schickel(a)psln.com>
To: <General Discussion :>; "On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 10:34 PM
Subject: Re: HP 2000 BASIC help / TREK73
Pete,
I programmed a little bit on 2000F and may retain a little
bit....
Pete Turnbull wrote:
Questions:
All the lines have two spaces between the line number and the code.
All, that is, except for a few that have an '@' in place of the second
space. Is that significant (does it mean "ignore this" or something?)
or is it just an artifact of a noisy Teletype line? (The listing
appears to have been made on a Teletype, which needed a new ribbon and
a better platen roller.)
If it's a straight "LIST" of the program, then the format would
be a standard format of the line number followed by two spaces; so
I would bet that the @s are spurious and can be ignored.
What does '14 in a PRINT statement, in front of a quoted string, mean
(eg in PRINT '14"SULU")? I wondered if it were something like PRINT
TAB(14)"... but there are TAB()s elsewhere. A control character,
perhaps? If cursor or screen control, are they octal or decimal (I'd
guess decimal) and is there a table anywhere?
I'm not sure about this one, but this may have been a way to print
control characters in a PRINT statement without using CHR$(). If so,
what would a control-n do on a teletype? I thought it *might* be octal,
but that would make it a form-feed, which wouldn't make much sense
in the status sections because it would print <FF>TORPEDOES<FF> and
then the status, which would waste a *lot* of paper....
What exactly do the first two parameters to the
ENTER command do? They
always seem to have three variables (eg ENTER T2,T,X$).
Looking at the setup in TREK73, all the T* variables are initialized
to be 1, 2, 4, 8 ... 512. If I remember rightly, ENTER lets you get
the time the user takes to enter the input. It looks like it's probably
"ENTER <time allowed>, <time taken>, <input>". The time is
probably
seconds, and what is returned is the time taken to respond, with a
negative being returned if the user takes more than the allowed time.
If you look at a lot of the input, there's a check after the ENTER
gets the input of the form "IF T<0 then ...." this puts a time squeeze
on the player to make it harder to spend time plotting angles, making
decisions, etc. ENTER also accepts input without printing a "?" for a
prompt. I don't think there was a way to stop INPUT from printing a "?"
every time.
This brings back memories. I never could get into this one, since I
could never get the proper strategy figured out. I preferred the
other TREK where you had to eliminate the Klingons in the galaxy....
Later,
Frank