Fun? with BASIC

[x16tial]

So, I'm messing around with building BASIC code with Assembly and here is some possibly fun info for you:
I wanted to see how many lines of basic I could cram into the available BASIC RAM.
So, this program:
0 A$="*"
1 PRINTA$;
...
With line 1 repeated as many times as possible, incrementing by 1, resulted in a program with ending line number 4292.
So, when RUN, prints 4292 asterisks, not even filling up one 80x60 screen (4800 characters).
The program ends on byte $9ef1, consuming 38641 bytes (I'm not counting basic's 00 at $0800)

Run time of the ml program to build the BASIC program is imperceptible, basically instantaneous, I could put in some timing code to get a number, but meh

Later!

[rje]

OK, so you're using an assembly program to build out a BASIC program.  No transpiler, this is all on-board.

Looks like you're (correctly) using the ? token for PRINT.  Otherwise I think it would be appx half as many lines.

Interesting, amusing, and interesting.

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by rje

[x16tial]

Yeah, all basic keywords (and operators) are tokenized whether you input the full keyword, or use the shortcut. PRINT's token is $99, for example.  So all *V2* keywords and operators use only one byte.  They also are all $80 and greater (bit 7 set).  The new keywords introduced in the X16 ROM take two bytes, one for the "escape" code $CE, and another for a token, again $80 and greater.  There are 68 V2 keywords, and 8 operators, making 76 tokens ($80 through $CB), and X16 includes 22 new keywords ($80 through $95).

Edited March 1, 2021 by x16tial

[x16tial]

And a bit of other info.  My program above is pretty inefficient on space, by doing one statement per line.  Every BASIC line has 5 bytes of "overhead", so each additional statement on one BASIC line saves 5 bytes per statement, by not having it on its own line.  I might play with how many PRINTA$;'s I could get by packing in the statements, and I could do it two ways.  One way, by using the 80 character  limit per line that you get when entering lines in the screen editor and a 2nd way that allows you to get 250 bytes per line, when building the BASIC lines from Assembly.  Possibly more "Fun" to come! 

[rje]

I actually ran out of space with a space-trader game I was working on over the summer... there was less than 4K of heap left... but about 10K of the program was read in from data statements, so it's not a pure example...

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by rje