Stuff on eBay & Pilot Language

[Mendon]

Has anyone checked out eBay for 8bit items in the last couple days? EGADS there is a TON of games and programs on there that I would love to own; stuff I haven't seen in a long, long time. And it all appeared suddenly, like there was a mass wave to sell 8bit items.

 

One of the items on there is a Mr. Cool cart; maybe its just me but I always enjoyed it more than Q*Bert.

 

One other item I was interested in was a complete Pilot program. My oldest son is interested in learning something about programing on the 8bit; I've never used or read much about Pilot. Any comments on whether its good or not for learning purposes?

 

Mendon

[Shannon]

Pilot is a cool languate but alot of it is built around recursive logic.

 

The drawing (with the turtles) based on math.. Turn left x degrees, move forward x, etc.

 

And it's got some great word parsing routines.

 

It also forces you to use structured programming.

 

Even though I didn't use it much I was glad I learned it. I thought it was a neat little language. Not sure how well stuff learned from it would be applicable to more modern languages though.

[Mendon]

Thanks for the response, Shannon; much appreciated!

 

I really don't know how much or how serious my son is about learning some programming on the 8bit. Do you (or anyone else) have any good recommendations for him? I know he's been fooling around with Basic some but what would be the next step for him if he wants to get serious about it at all?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Mendon

[Shannon]

Just a guess (I'm not programming expert)...

 

but 6502 assembly wouldn't hurt, but he would need something like the "Inside The Atari" book from compute, or the reference manuals (I think that is what they are called). To understand what areas to peek and poke. This would give him a good understanding of the low level/internal workings. Maybe synapse assembler

 

But if he is thinking more high level. If you can get your hands on the [Action] language and the manual it came with or a book on it. Action was a very good language that I wish I woulda learned sooner.

 

If he wants a basic language with less limitations get the OSS Basic XL/XE cart.. fantastic cartridge.

 

I even think there are a couple C compilers floating around for the atari 8-bit, although I barely remember them.

[Shannon]

there is a pilot book on ebay as well if you had not noticed.

[Mendon]

Thanks again for all the info, Shannon. Much appreciated!!

 

Mendon

[+bcombee]

Shannon, I think you were describing Logo, not PILOT. While both had turtle graphics support, Logo was a much better language, being based on LISP, and would let you define commands that could call other commands or themselves.

 

PILOT was a BASIC-like language with line numbers and commands that were all single letters. For example:

 

10 T: Hello, World!

20 G: 10

 

It was designed for writing educational programs, and had a command to get input from the user and see if any of the words in that input matched a word list. The language was pretty limited, and there's no real reason to persue it.

[+bcombee]

BTW, PILOT stands for "Programmed Inquiry, Learning, Or Teaching".

[Shannon]

Was there a LOGO language for the Atari?

 

I really must be confused.