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Category:FOCAL: Difference between revisions
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FOCAL
Like JOSS and BASIC, FOCAL was not intended to be used for developing large applications; the manual said it was "designed to help scientists, engineers, and students solve numerical problems." The design goals thus emphasize simplicity and accessibility.
FOCAL could also be used satisfactorily on quite small computers: its interpreter runs on a PDP-8 with only 4k words (6k bytes) of storage and still leaves some space for user programs. During startup, the FOCAL interpreter asks if the built-in sine, cosine, log, exp, and arctangent functions should be kept in memory. If the user answers NO to one (or both) of these questions, memory occupied by these functions is freed and can be used for FOCAL programs instead.
==FOCAL commands==
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==Running FOCAL in a PDP emulator==
There is a tiny [https://jeelabs.org/2016/09/tfoc---pdp-8-in-256-lines-of-c/ PDP-8 emulator in C] which also includes a binary dump of the FOCAL-69
To exit the emulator, use Ctrl-Backslash. The emulator will quit and dump the RAM zero page in octal.
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