🚀 go-pugleaf

t...@its.bt.co.uk (Tim Oldham) writes:

>The BBC B micro's BASIC had a (very good) renumber command. If you got the
>parameters wrong in some way (which I forget; I suppose it was something
>like renumber 500,0 instead of 0,500 ie renumber the lines 0 to 500), you
>got the error message
>	Silly

Yes, *very*!! We got a lot of fun out of this at school, as I recall!

The only real problem is -- it wasn't the *user* who was being silly, it
was the author(s) of the Basic interpreter being lazy. the RENUMBER
command took up to two arguments -- a starting line number, and a step
size (with defaults of 10). The "Silly" error message meant either that
your step size was zero (reasonable), or that it was greater than 255
(clearly lazy programming!). Of course, with a limit on the highest
allowable line number of 32767, the restriction was probably not a
severe problem!

Mark.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Summerfield, Telecom Research Laboratories | Whatever the missing mass of 
ACSnet[AARN/Internet]: m.summerfield@trl.oz[.au]| the Universe is, I hope it's 
Snail: PO Box 249, Clayton, Vic., 3168          | not spiders!