Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ghshephard 3664 days ago
The most frustrating, sincerely upsetting experience I ever had was when I was about 13 or 14, and encountered the following code: (roughly)

   10 for x = 53248 to 57343
   20 poke x, peek (x)
   30 next x
When I saw this code - it caused physical angst on my part, as it was obvious that this code did nothing. I knew nothing about memory mapped ROM/RAM banks at the time, but I quickly learned....

I've never had as much fun programming as I did with that Commodore 64 and the Programmers reference manual (and all the Compute! secrets/tips books) - it was the youtube minecraft videos of our time.

1 comments

That code you posted immediately struck me as wrong--not real C64 code. It took me a minute to realize why: it's in lowercase.

(The C64 defaulted to a character set with only capital letters, to leave more space for graphical characters. There was a mixed-case set available, but no one ever used it except for word processing and text adventures.)

Although if you did switch to the mixed-case set it would show source code in lowercase.
If only you had told me twenty years ago.