Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal
by tasty_freeze on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @09:47PM
(#26562609)
No question it would not make sense in that original 4K or even 8K BASIC, but MS produced BASICs with much larger memory budget and the matrix ops never appeared (as far as I know).
Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal
by Someone on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @03:54AM
(#26564574)
They added tons of stuff that made business sense to them. Apparently, matrices as built-in types didn’t. Nowadays, the language is powerful enough to implement them as a library (e.g. https://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.asp?ID=3682. Operator overloading became possible at some time, too. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/program...)
It’s not as if they don’t know matrices exist. Excel has matrix operations (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/mmult-function-40...)
The GE-635 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-600_series) that it ran on most of its life could have 4 CPUs, had protected memory and floating point hardware, and supported at least 200 kilowords of memory (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ge/GE-6xx/CPB-371A_GE-635_Syste...)
At 36 bits/word, that’s 900 kilobytes.
The first version of Microsoft basic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC) ran in 4 kilobytes (leaving about ¾ kilobytes for programs and data), so it’s understandable that it lacked some features (it didn’t even have else clauses in if statements, had SIN, but not COS or TAN, didn’t support integer or string variables, etc))