BBC BASIC Programming

[c0re_dump]

Last week, I received a copy of Donald Alcock's Illustrating BBC BASIC, another in his series of hand-drawn programming books. According to the dedication, the manuscript for this one was saved from a house fire by the Fire Brigade. It seems to go much deeper into implementation details then the generic Illustrating BASIC. I suppose that's to be

Comments

[quercus]

I'm review editing a book on Processing at the moment. What's the first example program in the chapter on cellular automatons?

Nothing much changes, does it.

[c0re_dump]

I've also seen the Game of Life in Etudes For Programmers by Charles Weatherell. That book's over 30 years old now and suggests that you write the programs in PL/1 or COBOL or some now-obscure language -- all in batch mode, too, of course.

[quercus]

COBOL still isn't obscure. It's not even dead yet, let alone buried.

I share office space with (the mythical "version 2" people) PICK programmers who regularly interact with live COBOL systems, still being developed by live COBOL developers. The PICK crew recently signed a squillion dollarpound new contract for a new UK gov system, still in PICK.

I've never used Algol-68. Far too new 8-) Much of my uni time was spent on a port of vile decades-old Algol-60, written by generations of physicists, from the ancient steamframe into vile Fortran for the shiny new Estriel mainframe. This was seemingly easier than converting Algol-60 into Algol-68. Hardest part was probably understanding the enormous Algol-60 manual, originally written by the Byzantium Civil Service and revised by the Catholic Magisterium.

A Turtle, a Dragon and Conway's Game of Life

[nevillednz]

You may be interested in the following code specimens:

Conway's Game of Life

Dragon curve
Both the above are written in OOP style, but use Algol 68!

Did you create any other Algol68 programs?

BTW (Wikipedia): ALGOL 68C was used by Stephen Bourne and Mike Guy to write the first life game programs on the PDP-7 with a DEC 340 display (see Scientific American 223 (October 1970): 120-123. (PDF) article) "For long-lived populations such as this one Conway sometimes uses a PDP-7 computer with a screen on which he can observe the changes. The program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne. Without its help some discoveries about the game would have been difficult to make."

N joy
NevilleDNZ
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