I'm reminded of an article in _Byte_ from the Early Days when it was still a worthwhile read. Some clever coder had written a couple of similar programs. The first calculated the square root of two and the second did the constant e. Both generated about 20,000 decimal digits and I seem to recall that this was on an Apple II (MOS 6502) with 32 KB RAM.
A more interesting hack done about the same time and also appearing in _Byte_ was the Pascal compiler written in Basic. The author used the function definition semantics (multiple lines and recursion enabled) peculiar to Northstar Basic to write a recursive descent parser.
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