[Year 12 Its] Commodore 64 programming

[Bricks J. Winzer]

>>Back in the good ole days of the Commodore 64, if you wanted to do
>>anything interesting you had a choice of 6502 assembly language or
>>6502 assembly language. In those days a Hacker spent hours studying
>>dis-assemblies of the BASIC ROM chips to learn how to program the
>>beast, not working out how to spread malicious code across WANs

> Sorry Mike, some of us didn't get past POKEing and PEEKing our C64s! 8^)

Something like this?

10 X=49151
20 READ Y
30 IF Y=999 THEN STOP
40 X=X+1
50 POKE X,Y
60 GOTO 20
100 DATA ...
110 DATA ...
...
500 DATA ...
510 DATA ...
...
670 DATA ...
680 DATA 999

I wrote this deliberately without a FOR loop because I don't know how
much data I have to POKE into the memory.  One thing I've tried to
point out to my students is when to use a For/Next loop, when to use
Do While/Loop, when to use Do/Loop Until etc...  My concern there is
that the students don't care (rather than don't get it).

Should I ignore some of these things, because computers are fast
enough to make such inefficiency irrelevant?  Am I out of date trying
to teach technicalities like these?

----------
B.J. Winzer
St Columba's College
Essendon