Quote: "Whilst it may have been a bit slow, it was powerful - you only needed two commands to do almost anything.
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just as well realy, cos that was almost half the command set, the C64 basic was minimal, no graphics commands or anything, even the Dragon had better graphics commands, the C64 sprites where due purely to the hardware, don`t thank Mr Gates for them.
you could do some evil self writing code tricks with the C64 screen editor, you could have up to 5 characters in the keyboard buffer, so if you wrote code that wrote 4 lines of basic to the screen, positioned the cursor at the top left and then poked 5 returns then something like
100 print "hello world"
105 for i=1 to 10
110 print "this program will continue"
115 next i
run 10
then it would add those lines to the code and then run the main program again, I made a self writing sprite creator that used that trick to write all the code and the loader and then remove the sprite editor to leave just the sprite creation code in ram
great fun
Tyger software