When working on MACHID I learned a lot. I remembered a little.
I never wrote any programs that looked at system information. That provided a little challenge. Anybody who actually does this stuff, can look at my code and see I have a lot to learn. I know in some basic’s there are more elegant ways to check bit values but I didn’t see one right off for Applesoft.
Now looking back at the ZBasic version, the source code was slightly bigger but the finished version was monstrous in size. The AppleSoft version that would run was only 3 blocks with another 21 blocks for BASIC.SYSTEM for a total of 24 blocks (A little less than 9% of the disk). The ZBasic version was 20 blocks, add in the three RT files for another 38 blocks, bringing it up to 58 blocks, more than twice the size (Almost 21% of the disk). I’ve looked at sizes in earlier postings, but this one drove home to me, that although I like some features of ZBasic, the size trade off could become huge. If a trivial program of 5 blocks gets blown up by four times, how much does a significantly less trivial program get?
Well, I’ll have to explore that another day. I have to get back to work on mapper.
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