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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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retrocomputing
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Though I really like the concept of building a new device which incorporates the inherent ease of programmability of the computers of yore, I think the 6502 is just too weird and limited for doing so. For example, in order to cram a halfway decent amount of memory into the thing they had to resort to bank switching. At the least they should've gone with a 65816 (apparently they tried but they initially had some problems with the '816 address bus multiplexing).
Also, how would that 'weirdness' impact using the device in a teaching context?
People would learn bad habits.
For example, due to parameter passing often being done via the zero page, recursion is unnecessarily hard on the 6502, whereas one could argue that recursion is one of the major skills to master for any programmer.
@irdc @feoh All programmers need to learn recursion and fully understand it so when they encounter it in the wild they can properly analyze what it is doing and replace it with non-recursive code.
A non-recursive recursive descent parser isn’t any easier to reason about.