HP 2000 BASIC help / TREK73

From: Frank Schickel <schickel_at_psln.com>
Date: Mon Nov 10 23:34:36 2003

Pete,

   I programmed a little bit on 2000F and may retain a little
bit....

Pete Turnbull wrote:
> Questions:
>
> All the lines have two spaces between the line number and the code.
> All, that is, except for a few that have an '_at_' in place of the second
> space. Is that significant (does it mean "ignore this" or something?)
> or is it just an artifact of a noisy Teletype line? (The listing
> appears to have been made on a Teletype, which needed a new ribbon and
> a better platen roller.)

If it's a straight "LIST" of the program, then the format would
be a standard format of the line number followed by two spaces; so
I would bet that the _at_s are spurious and can be ignored.

>
> What does '14 in a PRINT statement, in front of a quoted string, mean
> (eg in PRINT '14"SULU")? I wondered if it were something like PRINT
> TAB(14)"... but there are TAB()s elsewhere. A control character,
> perhaps? If cursor or screen control, are they octal or decimal (I'd
> guess decimal) and is there a table anywhere?

I'm not sure about this one, but this may have been a way to print
control characters in a PRINT statement without using CHR$(). If so,
what would a control-n do on a teletype? I thought it *might* be octal,
but that would make it a form-feed, which wouldn't make much sense
in the status sections because it would print <FF>TORPEDOES<FF> and
then the status, which would waste a *lot* of paper....
 
> What exactly do the first two parameters to the ENTER command do? They
> always seem to have three variables (eg ENTER T2,T,X$).

Looking at the setup in TREK73, all the T* variables are initialized
to be 1, 2, 4, 8 ... 512. If I remember rightly, ENTER lets you get
the time the user takes to enter the input. It looks like it's probably
"ENTER <time allowed>, <time taken>, <input>". The time is probably
seconds, and what is returned is the time taken to respond, with a
negative being returned if the user takes more than the allowed time.
If you look at a lot of the input, there's a check after the ENTER
gets the input of the form "IF T<0 then ...." this puts a time squeeze
on the player to make it harder to spend time plotting angles, making
decisions, etc. ENTER also accepts input without printing a "?" for a
prompt. I don't think there was a way to stop INPUT from printing a "?"
every time.
 
This brings back memories. I never could get into this one, since I
could never get the proper strategy figured out. I preferred the
other TREK where you had to eliminate the Klingons in the galaxy....

    Later,
      Frank
Received on Mon Nov 10 2003 - 23:34:36 GMT