- On the other hand, there are probably about as many references to BASIC not being just BASIC, but rather referring to a variety of dialects, as there are digitized listings. Moreover, about every of those listings is accompanied by a reference to the specific dialect it applies to. If there was a world model, it should be clear that these are not the same identical reference and those rather refer to a complex set of is-a / has-a relations. The actual outcome illustrates a serious limitation of LLMs with regard to real-world tasks.
(It also seems to hint at a general issue with intersecting partitions and, I guess, the same would apply to JS in the era of the "browser wars", say, something that runs on both Netscape 4.0x and the various incarnations of IE4.x, to make it easy.)
- This is much more like I would have expected this. – Thanks for risking your sanity in the name of sicence!
- While it worked out better than I would have thought, it also points out some crucial problems.
The problem being, if you don't know the answers already, the LLM doesn't fill any gaps in knowledge, you may have. E.g, I don't know Atari BASIC (just that pesky – or is it petcii? – MS BASIC). Accordingly, I have no idea about PRINT #6 or LOCATE, and ChatGPT apparently neither, so the duo of us won't arrive anywhere.
On a slight tangent, I'm kind of surprised and impressed to learn that Atari BASIC lets you use a keyword as a name with LET, something MS BASIC won't do, tokenizing it anyways, LET or not, as there is no such thing as context awareness.
- My suggestion: it's the "mode change" code/character found in various IBM punchcard encodings, punch 11-8-7, represented by an upper-case delta.
Rendering this slightly differently from the regular Greek letter, would make sense, I guess. This may also explain the varying representations in the manuals: some would represent this like in common EBCDIC charts, as a delta, while others would refer to it as represented in the actual on-screen character set.
(There is also the rather common problem with special characters in manuals, where the font used for the chart doesn't comprehend the particular glyph, giving rise to alternative, often more abstract representations, as these symbols were drawn in later.)
- BTW, there are now a few new debugging options.
(Bracketed address ranges additionally to breakpoints, which trigger either as PC enters or exits, optional trap for "illegal instructions", and a continuous CPU log, so you may find out how you wound up in a trap, regardless wat the regular trace was set to. — In essence, all you may need to trace some run away code.)
- BTW, here's a link to a more compact overview of the various blog posts:
- It's even better: the crucial parts of the source code are in the article, in plain sight! :-)
- [Author of the blog post here.]
For a more old-school approach, see "Sphere Mapping" by Frédéric Goset.
http://fredericgoset.ovh/informatique/oldschool/en/spheremap...
(This may well be why the LLM "knows" about this. May be interesting to compare approaches and variable names. – It's also linked in the article.)
- Great! Maybe add the controls and gameplay description to the hosted page, so that users may learn how to interact?
- You can play it in online emulation here:
1) POLF, PET 2001N with graphics keyboard (turn left/right is actually "," and ";"):
https://www.masswerk.at/pet/?prg=polf&rom=4&ram=16k&...
2) POLF, PET 2001/B with business keyboard:
- More
But I second the idea.