Comment by pjmlp
1 year ago
Note that the BASIC that could fit into 4K of RAM was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC, hence why many learnt BASIC as an interpreted language, while the original one always compiled to machine code before execution, in a kind of primitive JIT compiler.
Lisp and Pascal versions suffered from the same issue with subsetting language and runtime features.
In a lot of cases it only supported integer math, one of the selling points of Microsoft BASIC was that it supported floats. Notably Wozniak's Integer BASIC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_BASIC
wasn't considered good enough for education because it could only count to 32,767, there was the same problem with Level I BASIC for the TRS-80 Model I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_I_BASIC