ALPP 03-XX -- Personalized "Hello World" on Four Processors

(False start, keeping for notes.)

Personalized "Hello World" on Four CPUs.

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We can now get the ASCII code of a key input from the keyboard, as provided by the monitor/BIOS routines.

But I've been so focused on numbers since we got the "Hello World" string output (barely on the beach) working that I wasn't really thinking about showing how to get a string in. We don't really need to get a string in to do a simple calculator.

I think I have good reason. Numbers are pretty much what computers do, in order to get information in and out, so numbers are important.

But there's a cycle of understanding in this. Parsing numbers for real requires parsing a string, even if you're riding the keyboard. So I have two paths I can take you down, and it occurs to me that I possibly should have done the personalized Hello World in the 2nd unit.

Since I have the detour through stack frames in between, it's going to be a bit hard to just go back and patch that in -- and then send all readers who have finished this point back.

So, maybe, before we go parsing numbers, we should first learn how to get a string from the keyboard? 

That's what we're going to do here.

 

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