HP 2000 BASIC help / TREK73

From: Ed Sharpe <esharpe_at_uswest.net>
Date: Wed Nov 12 17:20:18 2003

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.


correct!!

ed sharpe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Schickel" <schickel_at_psln.com>
To: <General Discussion :>; "On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 10:34 PM
Subject: Re: HP 2000 BASIC help / TREK73


> 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 Wed Nov 12 2003 - 17:20:18 GMT