[VA] SRC #017 - April 1st, 2024 Spring Special

[JoJo1973]

LOL the Sixth:

I've no HP-71B, but I had a Commodore 64 so I can throw a couple of guesses:

LOL 6.2:

A famous challenge in those naive days was to write a program resulting in the largest number of errors. Of course the easiest way to accomplish the task is to dump the ROM area where the messages are actually stored and embellish the output to make it look like a real error message...

LOL 6.5:

The Commodore 64's screen editor doesn't accept more than 80 characters when editing a program line: there are a lot of dirty tricks to circumvent this limitation, but of course one always starts with the cleanest ones.

For example you could omit useless blanks between instructions and gain a little space to squeeze that extra statement... but sometimes you end up with an ambiguous statement that leaves the parser (and you!) scratching its head in puzzlement:

FORM=STOP is a variable assignment or the beginning of a loop: FOR M = S TO P ?

Cheers!