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90 points rbanffy | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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SeenNotHeard ◴[] No.45133316[source]
One limitation not mentioned is that Action! didn't support recursion. This had to do with how local variables were stored.

Whether it was the best language for 8-bit programming, it certainly was a great fit for the 6502, as the language targeted the peculiarities of that chip. Accessing hardware-specific features of the 8-bit Atari's was a snap, which was necessary in order to do anything more interesting than sieves or print loops.

Action! probably could've been ported to the Apple line, but 8-bits were winding down by the time it was released. Porting to 16-bit machines like the IBM PC or Mac (or even the Atari ST) would have been a tougher sell, since Pascal and C were better established by that point, and worked well on those machines.

Two bad things about Action!: Charging a license fee to distribute the runtime, and that dumb bang in the name.

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1. eschneider ◴[] No.45136874[source]
The lack of recursion was not a practical limitation on the Atari. Base systems were 16K and you really didn't have space for recursion. And the license fee for the runtime didn't feel that painful compared to the other options.
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2. NetMageSCW ◴[] No.45138993[source]
I think a bigger problem for recursion support is the 6502 being limited to a 256 byte stack by its 8-bit stack pointer.