1 Oct
2007
1 Oct
'07
2:17 p.m.
On 1 Oct 2007 at 16:01, Jim Battle wrote:
No, the real reason was that the BASIC was a two-level
interpreter. TI
didn't have the time/resources to write a BASIC interpreter in native
assembly, so they procured a BASIC interpreter written in an abstract
machine code, kinda like p-code, such that TI would then just have to
write an assembly level program to interpret the "p-code". I'm sure
they made other enhancements to this BASIC interpreter in order to
support the unique features of the hardware, though.
Back around 1978 or so, I recall visiting Ryan-McFarland and chatting
with Dave McFarland about some changes to their BASIC
compiler/interpreter. He mentioned TI and I let it pass without
comment. But yes, indeed, RM BASIC was implemented in a type of P-
CODE for both the parsing/compiling and runtime. It was hideously
slow on an 8085 and I can't believe it was much better on a 9900. I
wonder if that "TI Version" that they were doing was the selfsame one
that ended up on a real TI product.
It was bad enough that we did our own after trying to use the RM
software.
Cheers,
Chuck