SNAP was Re: teaching programming to beginners

Cameron Kaiser wrote: If you've got an HHC, you have the interpreter. It's in the main ROM. What you don't have is the compiler. SNAP is a token-threaded dialect of FORTH, developed by Friends Amis. Most of the HHC software, other than Microsoft BASIC, is written in SNAP. There was a SNAP cartridge that contained the compiler, allowing native SNAP development. It was in a cartridge rather than a plugin ROM because it is 16KB, and the maximum size 24-pin EPROM that could be used as a plugin was 8KB. There was also a SNAPBASIC ROM, which is completely unrelated to the Microsoft BASIC. I spent some time a few years back working on reverse-engineering the SNAP interpreter, and identified the tokens for some of the most common FORTH words, but that didn't get me beyond hand-coding very simple SNAP programs.