TheBF

Could be worse. Japanese students have four alphabets to learn. Hiragana, katakana, Kanji (sub-set Chinese characters) and "romanji". (our alphabet) I have read it can take up to twelve years of school for full fluency.

"Write the game snake in Python" 🤯

It's nice to have a smart person around the house. That's really neat to see that explained so clearly. Your work gives me the impression that this should be a very good PRNG. My burning question: When we dumb it all down to a >300 byte screen position or a random direction vector, is there a way to know that the BASIC or XB PRNGs would provide a material benefit versus a simpler solution? (You helped me with a simple analysis tool a few years back, but I am a humble business weanie so the amount of rigour involved was slightly less. One might say it was completely devoid of rigour.)

Those eyes are making me think of this screen saver I made. eyes.mp4 EYESII EYESIJ EYESIK

Wow that's important stuff. Bravo. There was a guy in the 90's in the UK who was doing railway systems in Forth. He had developed a method of proving the code was safe I believe which was a specification requirement. His name is escaping my old brain at the moment. Did some googling. It's Paul Bennet. https://wiki.forth-ev.de/lib/exe/fetch.php/en:projects:a-start-with-forth:certifyingforthsource_004_.pdf But nobody would begin to believe you can do anything well in Forth in the 21st century. I mean really, how could you, the compiler is not even 1MB.

Ya that was an insight that simplified my coding of Forth conditionals. ( = < > 0= etc.) Since CLR and SETO don't play with status you can compare a register, then clear it or set it to -1 as a default result. Then you can change the register based on the previous comparison instruction. It's almost like the 9900 designers knew how to write an instruction set. Something like: ( Apology in advance. I don't use normal Assemblers often) ZEROEQ CI R4,0 * 0= compare top of stack cache to zero CLR R4 JNE $1 SETO R4 $1 NEXT * return to Forth However even though it's only four instructions you can see why a native code compiler would be more efficient on 9900. In MACHFORTH or ASMForth this is only two instructions, compare to zero and the jump.

Very naughty photo. Your nerds are showing.

Nice to see you back Mark. I suspect life has gotten in the way of the serious job of playing with Forth on a 40 year old machine.

If you can convince a local TV station to do the story that gets people's attention. Better if it's a national network station where the story can get distributed across the country.

Excellent. Why? For that time that you need it and it won't work as expected. However if that is unthinkable then you are correct. Don't write code for stuff that "might" happen.

Curiosity question. Is there a way to access the screen management variables in the P-code system? Where I am going is; is there any point is seeing what mode the system thinks it is in? (Text, graphics 1, as the two most common ones) That way your gchar function could maybe know the line length so that 32 would be replaced by a variable that "knows" the current line length. Asking for a friend

That's pretty amazing for an Extended BASIC program.

Cool. My dad's family comes from a part of Canada with an Irish and French fiddle tradition. I played fiddle badly when I was young. I played guitar as a part-time professional for many years. I just took up Viola last June and joined a community orchestra. Good for old fingers and brains to get some exercise. But it does cut into my coding time. I am working on some Irish and Scots tunes on Viola. It's a bit harder but some of the tunes sound nice in the lower key.

Sounds like the future is coming at us quickly.

So does that mean that the CIA can't know what you are talking about... but Meta can?