Re: Pointer at the start of a BASIC line: what good is it?

On Mon 01 Nov 2021 at 17:09:37 -0700, gsteemso wrote:
> On Nov 1, 2021, at 11:02 AM, Spiro Trikaliotis <ml-cbmhackers_at_trikaliotis.net> wrote:
> > Actually, the ",unit,1" will not even be propagated to the floppy; it is
> > a computer-only distinction!
> 
> At the BASIC level, certainly! *grin* In fact, according to
> Hydrophilic's unparallelledly awesome BASIC Encyclopedia, the
> interpreter behaves as if any _even_ secondary address given to it was
> a zero and any _odd_ secondary address was a 1.

Not quite, I'd say. I usually type LOAD "blah",8,8 simply because that
types faster and it works exactly the same as LOAD "blah",8,1.

For saving to tape, with SA > 0 on a VIC-20 or later, if I remember
correctly, it creates a tape header block with a different identifier,
probably 3 or so (where 1 and 2 are a data file vs a program file, in
some order) as the first byte in the tape block. Unfortunately PETs
don't recognize these as valid and skip them.

And did you know that you can OPEN files on the keyboard device (0) or
the screen (3)? You can PRINT# to the screen and GET# / INPUT# from
both. And it works differently in some details than the usual GET and
INPUT.

-Olaf.
-- 
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