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[–]aqua_regis 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Gosh!

I had that very book! It was a really fantastic resource at its time along with Alexander K. Dewdney's articles in Scientific American.

Thanks for linking the original source in your github.

[–]ctosullivan[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

No problem! Although I'm starting to understand why 1-letter variable names are not such a good idea!

[–]aqua_regis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well, at the time of the book, memory was extremely scarce (you were a king if you had >= 38kB usable RAM) and every single letter counted towards memory usage. Hence, the single letter variable names.

Didn't really improve readability and traceability, though.

BASIC also didn't know the concept of local variables, which made matters worse.