(non?)HP Basic

[Tim Riker]

J. David Bryan wrote:
> 
>   10  FILES = ".D&D"
> 
> The HP FILES statement has either unquoted filenames or * characters to be 
> referenced by later ASSIGN statements.  Also, the filename shown would be 
> illegal.

I think the leading dot made the files hidden in directory listings.
This was a work in progress, not something I expected users to be
running yet. I was thinking it was a leading '!' but I trust the source
more than my memory. :)

>   2070  ON FNA(3) THEN 2110,2140
> 
> The ON...THEN statement is implemented as GOTO...OF in HP BASICs.
> 
>   2440  PRINT "LOAD .DRAGN"
> 
> PRINTing a command certainly wouldn't execute it in HP BASICs.

I'm fairly sure this was just me debugging. It was a comment to myself
that I now needed to "LOAD .DRAGN" :)  Notes on the printouts mention
CHAIN. I expect the format was exactly:

2440 CHAIN ".DRAGN"

> There were a few BASIC interpreters that were part of the 1000, 2000, and 
> 3000 contributed libraries.  Perhaps this is one of these, although the odd 
> filename seems to argue against it.

I do recall that the leading "." was a feature our admin (Frank Stover
as I recall) added to the system by request. There were no "libraries"
or other storage areas that I know off. All terminals could see the same
directory list, so students could access each others files. This added
the desire to have a way to hide them, and the leading "." was the solution.

> Was this the dialect that was running on the 2114B?

Yes, this was on our 2114 which I think was a B. I'm pretty certain that
the machine had 32k words of core memory on cards. That excludes an A,
but not the (perhaps fictitious?) C model.

This system had been at the school for quite some time, and probably
originally had just the one asr-33, paper tape reader, punch, card
reader and printer. The 2 crt terminals were added one at a time later.
I'm not sure what other upgrades had happened. There was no large hard
drive on the system. Just 2 floppy sized drives. I _think_ they were
both 8" floppies, but they were inside a small locked rack case, and I
as a lowly student did not have physical access.

Thanx for the notes!
-- 
Tim Riker - http://Rikers.org/ - TimR at Debian.org
Embedded Linux Technologist - http://eLinux.org/
BZFlag maintainer - http://BZFlag.org/ - for fun!