by SeenNotHeard
2 subcomments
- One limitation not mentioned is that Action! didn't support recursion. This had to do with how local variables were stored.
Whether it was the best language for 8-bit programming, it certainly was a great fit for the 6502, as the language targeted the peculiarities of that chip. Accessing hardware-specific features of the 8-bit Atari's was a snap, which was necessary in order to do anything more interesting than sieves or print loops.
Action! probably could've been ported to the Apple line, but 8-bits were winding down by the time it was released. Porting to 16-bit machines like the IBM PC or Mac (or even the Atari ST) would have been a tougher sell, since Pascal and C were better established by that point, and worked well on those machines.
Two bad things about Action!: Charging a license fee to distribute the runtime, and that dumb bang in the name.
by wduquette
7 subcomments
- The OP says that 8-bit CPUs couldn't handle Pascal well, and that Action! (release in 1983) was the first IDE for 8-bit machines.
But Apple Pascal was released for the Apple II in 1979. Based on UCSD Pascal, the Apple Pascal system was basically an OS that simply was an IDE; and it worked perfectly well on 8-bit hardware. I had quite a lot of fun with it back in the day.
by cmrdporcupine
2 subcomments
- "I found it endearing that to end an IF block you used FI (IF spelled backwards) and to end a DO block you used OD. That is some interesting symmetry although I’m not really sure it helps readability."
This comes straight from Algol if I'm not mistaken. It seems weird to us now (tho bourne shell / bash kinda has this in spots) but it was in the air in the 60s/70s.
When I've looked at it in the past I definitely got the sense that Action was very much inspired by Algol-68, but with some accomodations for the niche of 6502.
6502 is a terrible target for C (and even Pascal) compilation, I have often wondered if it made sense for someone to try and revive Action for the 21st century as a general purpose 6502 high level PL.
by greggman65
0 subcomment
- My best friend in high school, John Alvarado, and I, loved the game BoulderDash. John reproduced the algorithm for it in Action!
https://github.com/greggman/rockfall/blob/main/ROCK4.ACT
I've since ported that code multiple times. Once to Gameboy (unshipped, it was just for learning when I was hired to make a gameboy game). Once to C. Once to Java for a feature phone software interview. A couple of years ago to JavaScript
https://greggman.github.io/rockfall/
- An excellent interview with the creator of Action! - Clinton Parker.
https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-111-clinton-...
- I have this theory that Go tickles people because like Basic or something like Action it has all of these sort of abstraction ceilings that lead to "straight down the middle" procedural code.
Definitely leads to a feeling of velocity. I don't like the language that much but I do get the fun from that feeling!
- I loved programming in Action! The editor was great and both compilation and runtime were really fast. I used it for several years from high school into college until I got an Amiga. I wrote a paint program, 3D modeler and 3D renderer with Action! No floating point. Fixed-point math with lookup tables for sin/cos/etc.
by smackeyacky
1 subcomments
- You could argue that the “best” programming environment available for DOS machines was dBase. dBase III in particular. For storing rows of data and building text interfaces it was very impressive. Not for games, but for information systems that ran a lot of small business back then.
by jhallenworld
0 subcomment
- I never had Action!, but I did try Deep Blue C for the Atari 800. One issue was lack of brackets in the character set.. I think it used $( and $) instead.
https://www.atariarchives.org/APX/showdocs.php?cat=20166
There were some other weird 8-bit programming languages: PLM and MPL. These are PL/I clones for 8080 and 6800. I used MPL long ago and wrote an article about it:
https://github.com/jhallen/exorsim/tree/master/mpl
PLM was much more popular and better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/M
by NetMageSCW
0 subcomment
- When I started college my computer was an Atari 400 I had purchased with money from my after-school job programming commercial software. I had replaced the membrane keyboard with a third party “real” keyboard and had the Action! cartridge. I used the editor primarily to write papers for class printed on my dot-matrix electric arc printer (it produced the dots by scorching the paper with a tiny carbon electrode thus needing no ink, though the print was brown and lower contrast).
Sadly I sold the 400 to someone I knew for their child and loaned the Action! cartridge to a co-worker who moved across the country and we lost touch. I’ve been searching eBay for years for a copy of the manual as well - at one time I had an ambition to create a version for iPad or Windows.
- Another 8-bit "better than BASIC" language was COMAL. Similar to the language in the article, it also had structured programming constructs, and the C64 version had built-in turtle graphics, sprite, and sound commands. I remember picking a version up at a mall kiosk that sold PD disks and it expanded my horizons!
by charcircuit
1 subcomments
- This article doesn't really prove why it's the best. I feel like if it's the best it would have been ported to more systems.
- Blast from the past. Still have my Action cartridge.
- Any relation to ActionScript?
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