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| Authored by: bugstomper on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 06:59 AM EDT |
It actually isn't news if you find interpreters that practice the claims. The
PTO re-examination found that most of the claims of the '104 patent were
anticipated in the 1971 textbook by David Gries, "Compiler Construction for
Digital Computers" in its section on the design of interpreters.
Oracle is in the process of appealing the rejection, but you are pointing out
just one more language interpreter probably written like the textbook described,
doing just what the patent is claiming.
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| Authored by: SirHumphrey on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 07:29 AM EDT |
Although a lot of BASICs will allow multiple statements on one line, this only
works if none of them causes a branch. YOUR program may have been able to put
the statements from lines 10, 20 and 30 on one line, but the GOSUB would RETURN
to the next line of code, not the next statement, - a cruel lesson in the finite
efficiencies of programming paradigms.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: jesse on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 08:00 AM EDT |
you would have used:
40 IF VariableC > 5 THEN GOSUB 100
50 ...
100 <first statement line of subroutine>
...
120 RETURN
Because an IF could only have one statement following it. It also had to be all
on one line.
A multi-statement line could only have an if at the end (not middle).
It has been a VERY long time since Dartmouth BASIC.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 20 2012 @ 09:14 PM EDT |
Is BASIC a virtual processor?
You are showing an
example of the language. The implementation however could be done
in several different ways. There are many ways that program could be interpreted
or compiled. The devil is in the details.
If you really want to dig
into this type of thing, I would suggest browsing through some used book stores
for a few old books on the UCSD P-System. P-System predates Java by quite a bit,
but implemented a Java-like "VM" which offered "write once run anywhere" on a
great variety of hardware. That's not to say the two are identical, (they're
not), but some of the basic principles are the same.
P-System was sold
by the UCSD university to a company called Pecan who tried to commercialise it.
It had Pascal, Modula-2, Basic, and Fortran compilers, and could run either as a
complete stand alone operating system, or as a hosted VM on another OS. Apple
Pascal was actually an older version of if running as a hosted VM on Apple's OS.
If P-System had been open sourced instead of sold to a proprietary
software company, it might have evolved and grown and still be around today. If
you want to run it on modern hardware today however, you have to run it on some
sort of emulator which will emulate an 8 bit or 16 bit CPU.
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