What makes "FOCAL" FOCAL?

[Garth Wilson]

(04-11-2020 06:09 PM)Orome Wrote:  So it's primarily the things that follow from alphanumeric labeling that distinguish FOCAL?

Note that labels don't have to be alphanumeric to be labels. A useful feature of numeric labels is that you can use GETKEY or GETKEYX to wait for keyboard input, followed by GTO IND X (using flag 25 to catch errors caused by keys that don't go to any label) to use the key number as the name of a numeric label to get to the desired place in the program.

I have my 41cx which I use regularly, and two 71's which I almost never touch. The 71 definitely has tons more speed and memory (I have 177KB of RAM in mine), but the 41's RPN is more practical for most things for me; so I use a 71 only when I need to do something that requires the larger memory or where the 41's speed would be prohibitively slow. My programs are seldom more than a few hundred bytes, and for the number of times I run one, the development time is more important than the run speed, so I use the 41. I have Forth on the 71 (which is where I originally picked up Forth), but when I use Forth, I normally use a home-made workbench computer whose performance is far, far ahead of the 71's performance.