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• Atomic strings. A string is no longer an array of characters (like in C); it is instead a garbage-collected object (like in Scheme and Java). This allows for string arrays; DIM A$(10) resulted in a vector of ten string variables.
• Multidimensional arrays.
• Single-precision floating point variables with an 8-bit exponent and a 31-bit significand. Along with this came a trigonometry library.
• High-resolution graphics.
• CHR$, ASC, STR$, and VAL functions for converting between string and numeric types
• No more writing LET

However, relatively few action gameAction games could be considered the video game equivalent of action movies. Action games typically feature violent physical force, especially shooting, as their main interactive feature. External link A website with computer action games to download Comps were written in Applesoft BASIC, for several reasons:

• In this era of carefully counting clock cycles and limited memory, it was silly to write speed-dependent programs that ran only through a runtime interpreter.
• Integer variables had to be converted to reals before math could be performed on them; they were then converted back to integers. Slowly. Microsoft did not special caseA special case is generally an unexpected circumstance which may occur but should usually not. For example, in computer science, in which computers are used to solve problems by transforming input data into output data, algorithms are designed to be able this.
• So-called shape tableShape tables were a strange and little-used feature of Applesoft BASIC (did Integer BASIC support shape tables?) You took your image (the tutorial in the documentation used a simple square) and decomposed it into a series of vectors. The vectors were thens are a slow alternative to bitmaps. No provision existed for mixing text and graphics, except for the limited "Hardware split screen" of the Apple II (four lines of text at the bottom of the screen). No provision was added in the 128 KB Apple IIe and Apple IIc models' BASIC interpreters for the new machines' extra memory and double-resolution graphics, or for the Apple IIGS's 16-color mode. ( Beagle Bros offered machine-language workarounds for these problems.)
• The program was stored as a linked listIn computer science, a linked list is one of the fundamental data structures used in computer programming. It consists of a sequence of nodes, each containing arbitrary data fields and one or two references ("links") pointing to the next and/or previous n of lines; a GOTO took O(n) (linear) time.
• No sound support.
• The closed source movement was just beginning; software publishers found it was harder to crack a compiled binary than an interpreted source.

Here's Hello World in Applesoft BASIC:

This article includes text from Everything2, licensed under GFDL.