Garrett: Implementing UEFI Boot to Zork

Garrett: Implementing UEFI Boot to Zork

Posted Sep 25, 2013 4:00 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Garrett: Implementing UEFI Boot to Zork by branden
Parent article: Garrett: Implementing UEFI Boot to Zork

Naturally the alternate-reality ROM BASIC would have a wider integer type, since it would be running on a 64-bit CPU! The 1970's originals had 16-bit integers only because supporting wider ones would have meant more CPU and memory usage. The 6502 family (in Apple II, the 8-bit Commodore computers and many others) actually had only 8-bit arithmetic operations, but 8-bit integers would have been a bit too limiting even then...

The alternate-reality coder could also generously widen other types, like make floating-point variables 8 bytes, instead of 4 or 6 that were typical, and allow strings longer than 256 characters. He might even support more than 2 significant characters in identifiers. I wonder if a BASIC like this would still fit into 16Kb? x86_86 code is not as compact as 6502, but on the other hand, the ROM would not have to contain software floating-point routines any more.

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