Hadn't done one of these in a while. Went out to look for the comet, but suspect my horizon is too cluttered, or sky is too bright. But it was clear and there was the moon.
Switched over from fidget spinner to doing some hi-res graphics stuff in Virtual ][, at least until I can figure out what's going on, then I'll play with it on the IIc. I need to look at an old issue of Creative Computing magazine, which is easier to do here at the iMac.
It's from the July 1984 issue, The Sierpinski Curve: A Lesson in Debugging and Conversion, by David H. Ahl. I'd link to it, but Archive.org is still offline after being hacked. If you google Sierpinski, you get a lot of stuff about the triangle, not so much about the curve. The article includes a nice capsule summary of the curve. Wikipedia does too.
In the article, Ahl is trying to convert a version of a program written in BASIC for the NEC 8801 computer, a Japanese computer, to some other variant of BASIC. Ahl wasn't very clear on which version of BASIC he was converting from and to, but both seemed ultimately to be some variant of Microsoft BASIC, which Applesoft is as well.
Apart from just being kind of interesting to watch as it is drawn onto the screen (which takes ~2m40s for the 5th order curve, at stock Apple II speed), it also deals with the concept of recursion. I have some notional understanding of the concept, but since I seldom do any real programming, as a practical technique, it remains kind of opaque to me. From the article:
This program, incidentally, takes advantage of the feature in MSX Basic and MBasic that permits a subroutine to call itself. This is known as recursion. It is often said that languages such as Basic and Fortran do not permit recursion. This is simply not true. While not all versions of Basic permit a subroutine to call itself, there are other ways of achieving recursion, but that is a subject for another day.
There are several subroutines in this program that call themselves.
The program that Ahl was converting would overlay curves of different orders, so you could have the 2nd order curve appear over the 1st order curve. It makes for a somewhat more interesting display. So far, my version works in drawing a single curve of orders 1 through 5, but it gets buggy when it begins to overlay two curves, so that's what I'm trying to figure out.
Ahl implemented a stack array to keep track of, well, something. I was confused because he didn't dimension (BASIC "DIM" statement) the stack array first. Looking at the Applesoft Reference Manual, apparently Microsoft let you get away with this and it assigns memory for 11 subscripts (elements 0 to 10) automatically. I'm not getting a BAD SUBSCRIPT ERROR, so I don't think that's the problem.
Anyway, it's something to distract me from the election. I cannot fathom how this thing can supposedly be this close. On the one hand, I'm somewhat encouraged by Harris's consistent, albeit slim, lead. I'm also encouraged by the evident lack of enthusiasm for Trump exhibited by my neighbors.
Four years ago, my street, and many if not most of the streets in this development, were positively festooned with American flags. This was code for Trump supporters, since the HOA doesn't permit partisan flags of any kind. Nothing like that today.
We were also having regular weekly "Trump flotillas" and boat parades. None of that has happened. Yet.
I don't see a lot of golf carts or pickup trucks driving around flying enormous Trump flags.
I'm rather certain that most of those folks will vote for Trump again; but they're not proud of it anymore. They don't want to own it.
Which is of absolutely no comfort.
"Plausible deniability."
It's almost more chilling.
And it's not just "rural Americans" who support this monster. These are wealthy suburbanites who embrace this fascist.
I'm eager to cast my mail-in ballot, so I can go online and verify that it has been counted. Then, if I have a stroke between now and election day, at least I'll have done what little I can to stop this catastrophe.
In the mean time, I'm going to distract myself by playing with old computers.
I need to order a 16-pin ribbon cable to plug into the Apple IIe in the garage. I want to bring those signals out to a breadboard to play with. This program is nothing but subroutines. Maybe add a line in four of the subroutines to ping one of the four annunciators available at that connector to light a different colored LED for each subroutine and see which one is lit most?
Well, mostly just because blinky lights are cool.
Something to look at...
Instead of staring into the abyss.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:53 Monday, 14 October 2024