The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

A classic blunder, like getting involved in a land war in Asia

The first time I included some BASIC code, I typed in the sample directly from a magazine (like we used to do back in the 1980s). The second (and most recent) time I included BASIC code, it was extracted from a disk image downloaded from the Intarwebs (using code I wrote) and then decoded into ASCII, using code I wrote, based off a text file I also found on the Intarwebs. I didn't notice when I posted the code because it was a wall of text 32 characters wide (the width of the text screen on a Color Computer). It was only months later when I finally noticed all the THENNOTs littering the code.

There was nothing wrong with the actual file, but I did locate the bug in my code:

char const *const c_tokens[] =
{
  "FOR",
  "GO",
  /* ... */
  "SUB",
  "THEN"
  "NOT",
  "STEP",
  "OFF",
  /* ... */
  "DSKO$",
  "DOS"
};

If you look close, you'll see there's a missing comma after the THEN token, and in C, two literal strings separated by whitespace are concatenated into a single string. Thus, all the THENNOTs I was seeing. And a bunch of incorrect code because most of the BASIC keywords were then off-by-one (a classic mistake of C programming).

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