I tried this compiler out back in the day and found the benefits, at least with the AppleSoft programs I had access to (mostly MECC titles) were fairly negligible. What rarely popped up, however, were show-stopper errors — programs would compile & run. That was nice.
>I tried this compiler out back in the day and found the benefits, at least with the AppleSoft programs I had access to (mostly MECC titles) were fairly negligible.
I suppose that a compiler wouldn't do much to make something like the original BASIC The Oregon Trail feel much faster; I think the sailing-on-a-raft part wasn't added until the 1985 version, which likely was not written in Applesoft.
>What rarely popped up, however, were show-stopper errors — programs would compile & run. That was nice.
Beyond being itself written in Applesoft BASIC as I noted elsewhere, TASC's coverage of BASIC keywords is almost entirely complete, going by chapter 7 of the manual. Any given Applesoft program has a very high chance of successfully compiling out of the box, and the very few differences with the interpreted language can be easily worked around (if the `DIM` command is any indication). As one used to aftermarket compilers that only support subsets of the language, TASC's comprehensiveness is very, very impressive.
