Hi Blake. I can concur with some of your "rambling." In fact I do intend to do a rough translation of one of the games in the book. 

What's great about printed BASIC listings of games is that they tend to be relatively short, so they're fun to reimplement. That said, before doing an implementation of something, it helps to understand the original program very well. Arguably, the best way to understand a small program is to type it in, and deal with whatever bugs crop up right?

I'd ideally be doing this in Squeak from the start, but I'm already into using an Apple IIGS emulator to get started.

> On Oct 1, 2014, at 11:09 AM, blake <dsblakewatson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Heh. Those books are the "well" I go back to when learning new languages. (I have both in print and learned to program using them.)
> 
> That said:
> 
> The code in those books is truly, truly awful, by necessity, due to the limitations of the Basic interpreters of the time. It's easier to reverse-engineer the code based on the limited printouts than to figure out what's going on with the one-character variable names and GOTOs being the primary means of branching.
> 
> And with THAT said:
> 
> Something LIKE those books could be incredibly useful. The one thing they had that most environments today don't is that you could start really simple, get a product, and build really easily on it. The Transcript isn't quite up to the task, and it's a big leap from the transcript to a GUI.
> 
> Rambling aside, when you think about it, it's a pretty small language you could build a DSL for: Variable assignment, basic math, IF-THEN, GOTO and RND....it's all on one page: http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=i12
> 
> Just have the PRINT go to a 80x25 scrolling grid. Heh. Fun!
> 
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