In a follow up to an article I posted about undocumented syntax, here we go again…
When all you had was a cassette recorder, loading and saving was simple:
CLOAD "PROGRAM" CSAVE "PROGRAM"
When all you had was a single disk drive, loading and saving was simple:
LOAD "PROGRAM.BAS" SAVE "PROGRAM.BAS"
When you had more than one disk drive, loading and saving was still simple… Just add the drive number:
LOAD "PROGRAM.BAS:0" LOAD "PROGRAM.BAS:1" COPY "PROGRAM.BAS:0" TO "PROGRAM.BAS:1"
And we liked it that way…
0:, 1:, 2: and 3:???
Over in the CoCo Discord chat, I just learned from William “Lost Wizard” Astle that the drive number can also be put at the start of the filename:
SAVE "1:PROGRAM.BAS" LOAD "1:PROGRAM.BAS"
Huh??? He points out that DOS modifications, such as RGB-DOS/HDB-DOS, do not support this.
And it’s just weird.
If I remember correctly, this syntax worked on multiple Disk operating systems that Microsoft made (I think including MS-DOS/PC-DOS, although my memory is getting quite old on that and might be incorrect).
I have now seen that some “tricks” we learned were actually used in examples in the Radio Shack manual, but I don’t recall ever seeing this one or the PAINT@ stuff. Makes me wonder how code got used to support something that users weren’t even told about. I do recall there are functions in Color BASIC that are not listed in the original manual, as well.
Caveman Lawyer: “It’s strange and I don’t like it”.