I learned today that BASIC V2 only cares about the first two characters of a variable name. SCORE and SCISSORS are, to the machine, the same cheerful disaster.
What other beginner surprises are worth putting on a one-page warning sheet?
Tokenizer surprise with variable names
3 replies · opened JUL 1 ago
Spaces do not protect you from keywords. I once made a comment line that BASIC interpreted with great enthusiasm.
Array dimensions default smaller than I assumed. Explicit DIM saves a very confusing afternoon.
The garbage-collection pause when strings pile up. First time it happened, I thought the computer had frozen.
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