| > The nostalgia for me around the language is strong Same here. I cut my programming teeth on BBC Basic and later 6502 assembly, initially on an Electron, then the Model Bs at school, and we later had a Master 128 at home. The integrated multi-pass assembler was a godsend for someone who got to the point of wanting to play around at a lower level, but before getting to that stage the language had other things that set it far apart from other micros of the era: • Better structured programming constructs: proper procedures and functions where some other 8-bit BASIC implementations had nothing beyond GOTO/GOSUB. With a little hoop jump you could completely do away with line numbers. • Long variable names, where some implementations only allowed two, or even just one, character. This allowed code to be a little more self-documenting. IIRC it only considered the first 40 characters⁰ despite not erroring when there were more though, so if you used anything longer one variable could silently clobber another. ---- [0] but who was using such long names in the limited memory¹ of an 8-bit home micro?! [1] I did actually write something a bit akin to modern JS minimisers, to make things fit in the smaller model A² machines: it removed REM statements and did a fairly naive scan-then-search-and-replace to replace long names with shorter ones [2] these had only 16KB rather than 32, which after taking out screen memory and other standard allocations were taken out didn't leave a lot of room for your code to live in |
There's no obvious length check. I guess the actual limit will be 255 or 254 characters, maybe minus a bit if the info block has any extra data.
EDIT: previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246063