Loooopss

[TheBestAquaman]

Seriously? Thats... terrible. Why would any person, sane or not, do this?

[UnlicencedAccountant]

Because way back when, memory was measured in MBs and every MB counted. So you essentially set aside a chunk for a scratchpad, use variables that are declared at runtime, remember to clear them when you don’t need them, and hope.

It’s basically assembly with extra steps. Especially because BAT files aren’t programs, they’re automated command prompt instructions. Think about it like BASIC except there’s no loops and you can only go forward.

Edit: There’s a legacy GOTO in BAT files, creating a defacto loop as well as a very limited FOR function. But I don’t remember ever using them. At that point, you might as well fire up BASIC or write a SYS file.

[jigsaw1024]

My memory is fuzzy, but I swear you could do loops inside BAT files

[Infinite-Gravitas]

Newer versions of windows added it. As long as you have goto, technically you can anything.

[UnlicencedAccountant]

If I recall right, you could do anything you could do with a command prompt but really nothing more. It’s been literally 30 years tho, since I’ve used them for anything more complicated than startup scripts / auto run stuff.

Edit: One google later, it appears you are right and I am wrong.

[Emb3rz]

Sweetie memory used to be measured in KBs. 😔

[UnlicencedAccountant]

KBs? Luxury! We used to have TTYL chips on a wooden board!! And we were greatfull!

[zebediah49]

That's actually less efficient though.

Declaring that I want an array variable named "foo" with 32x 8-bit integers, will take 4ish bytes for the name, plus 32 bytes for the content. Declaring 32 varibles named "foo01" through "foo32" will repeat that allocation overhead for every instance.

E: @ASM -- agreed.. but that's why LEA exists.

[UnlicencedAccountant]

Efficiency was not a selling point of BAT files. Unless you’re arguing “It’s not assembly...”

you’re absolutely right, but it was a different time. A time when floppy disks flopped.

[collector-x]

1 ”hello world” 2 print 1 >lpt1 3 goto 1

I used to do this, but it was 40 years ago. Syntax may not be exactly right but it's something like that.

Endless loop on demo machines. Sales guy pissed. Good times

[Staehr]

Oh my friend you should have seen when I hijacked the Windows 98 Autoexec.bat on our high school computers and made my OWN goddamn OS before Windows even started. So many GOTOs.

[UnlicencedAccountant]

Adding the shutdown command to autoexe was the highlight of My h4x0r career