LOAD "PL/CBMBASIC",8,1: Commodore 64 BASIC for PostgreSQL
If you are of a certain age, the words 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE will do something to you that no amount of therapy can undo. You remember the blue screen. You remember typing in three pages of a listing from a magazine, getting ?SYNTAX ERROR IN 2340 , and not knowing which of the three pages contained the typo. You remember that the disk drive was device 8, and that it was slower than continental drift. I have some news. All of that now runs inside PostgreSQL. PL/CBMBASIC is a procedural language extension that executes function bodies on Commodore 64 BASIC V2. Not a lookalike, not a tribute act: the actual Microsoft/Commodore interpreter from 1982, by way of Michael Steil's cbmbasic project, which statically recompiled the 6502 ROM into C. That C is compiled straight into the extension's shared library, so the interpreter lives inside your backend process. Every function call is an in-memory power cycle: zero the 64KB RAM array, reset the CPU registers, and re-enter the ROM at...