Thursday, May 17, 2012

Corrections to Apple Basic User Manual

As I work with Apple BASIC I noticed a few errors and omissions on the manual. I wrote them down in the hope that they may be useful to someone else. Maybe Apple will issue a revised version :-)

The latest version can be found here but for convenience (and so it is searchable by Google) I'll paste my current version here.






This document lists some corrections to errors in the document "Preliminary Apple Basic Users Manual' October 1976. It also lists some notes on features that are non-obvious or of interest.

Title Page:

Note: The woodcut image of Sir Issac Newton sitting under an Apple Tree was the original Apple Computer Company Logo drawn by Ronald Wayne, the third employee of Apple.

Note: The address listed is no longer the headquarters of Apple Computer :-)

Second page:

Error: The word "likley" is misspelled (It is ironic that this is the page that says the manual may contain errors and asks users to send in corrections).

Page 1:

Note: An alternative way to get to the monitor from BASIC is to execute the command "CALL -256".

Page 2:

Note: The instructions for saving BASIC programs on tape assume LOMEM and HIMEM have their default values. If not, you need to adjust the command listed in step 3 accordingly.

Page 4:

Note: A quirk of Apple BASIC is that the number -32768, which is a valid 32 bit signed value, is not accepted. I don't think this was an oversight As Woz was an excellent programmer and had designed calculators in his career. I suspect it was to allow the the "*** >32767 ERR" message to be used for all overflow errors. We'll come across this issue later.

Page 6:

Error: Under point 3, if a string is not dimensioned it's length is taken to be one, not zero.

Page 7:

Error: The word "destingation" should be "destination" (in two places).

Page 8:

Note: Unlike expressions, string comparison using "<>" is not supported, only "#".

Page 10:

Error: The statement that changing LOMEM or HIMEM destroys the current user program is not correct. The program will still exist but may not run reliably. You should execute a SCR command before setting LOMEM or HIMEM. There is also no check that the values for LOMEM and HIMEM are valid.

Note: There is no way to suppress the question mark prompt in INPUT statements.

Page 12:

Note: The target of a GOTO or GOSUB can be an expression. This feature is not supported in most other versions of BASIC.

Note: In a remark statement like

10 REM A COMMENT : GOTO 100

Apple BASIC considers the whole line to be a comment.

Page 13:

Note: An error is reported if the last line executed in a program was not an END statement.

Note: Due to the quirk of not supporting the number -32768, you cannot use this address ($8000 in hex) with PEEK, POKE, or CALL.

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