[cctalk] Re: BASIC

Great discussions about BASIC. I talked about the IBM 5110 flavor of BASIC last year (such as its FORM keyboard for quickly making structured input forms), and recently "re-learned" that it defaults to running with double-precision. But if you use "RUNS" instead of "RUN" then the same code is run using single-precision (but I haven't verified yet if that translates into an actual runtime speed difference). I think most of the "street BASICs" used single precision (if they supported floats at all). But speaking of Microsoft BASIC, I think Monte Davidoff is still around and deserves a lot of credit for doing the floating point library in the initial Microsoft BASIC (but it's a bit sad that history has lost the names of individual contributors But what I mostly wanted to mention is that on the Commander X16 project, one special thing we now have in its System ROM is a program called BASLOAD. Unfortunately we couldn't come up with a cooler name -- it's not a native compiler, like Blitz. I'm not sure what you'd categorize BASLOAD as, a pre-parser of sorts? By license, we were stuck with the Commodore V2 BASIC (that was derived from Microsoft BASIC, with the story being that Gates wasn't so interested in a 6502 port of Microsoft BASIC, and just sold BASIC source code to Commodore for a flat one time fee rather than a license). One of the main limitations of that V2 BASIC is the two-letter variable names. BASLOAD gives you a feel of being similar to QuickBASIC - in that you can do regular "BASIC things" without using line numbers. You can have long variable names (like THE.SOLUTION) and you can use symbol labels in GOTO/GOSUB (GOTO PROCESS.MORE.DATA, where "." is used since standard PETSCII doesn't have an underscore). All BASLOAD does is "convert" your BASIC-source text file into a tokenized Commodore V2 BASIC input file. Your long variables get "auto assigned" into available two-letter BASIC variables, and it just keeps track of the line number targets of your symbolic labels. Stefan Jakonson did the actual development of BASLOAD, including making it "ROM-able" so that it is always available. Anyhow, BASLOAD has been a "game changer" to me - in that it would have been great to have something like it back in the 80's. Not being constrained by the two-letter variable, and using symbolic label difference, while not dealing with line numbers at all (plus things like similar to a #include to import other BASLOAD source files). Couple more BASIC related comments: (1) There was talk regarding BASIC as an operating system. While not fancy, I actually do think in a way it counts as an operating system. Fundamentally as a parser, BASIC is "just" stream in an input, and some output is produced when you RUN. But to get that point, you need a kind of "operating environment" wrapper around BASIC. In the very early days, that was the line printer. But then CRTs started to become affordable around 1970. Adapting that capability with a text-generator and a console - you have things like the blinking cursor (between each blink, things like time/clock interrupts, joystick polling), and the text-screen itself is your editor (as a gateway to manipulate your program, one screen at a time with no scrollback buffer). And similar to the line-printer days, when you press CR (carriage return) the content on the current line is tokenized and stored in memory (sort of - again on the IBM 5100 it will parse-check upfront and won't let you ENTER/CR a syntactically invalid BASIC line; it shows this arrow on what column the error is which has to be corrected before the line can be committed into memory -- most "street BASIC" seem more forgiving about that, probably just to conserve ROM space and fit in under 8KB). And the BASIC manages access to hardware like printer, serial port, and some file handles. (2) Microsoft BASIC appears on the 1979 NEC PC-8001, which includes disk drive support (similar to the later additions to Commodore BASIC also around 1980). But in the NEC PC-8001 manual about BASIC, it refers to a "FAT" format used on disks. So I suspect Microsoft's early work in adding disk drive support into BASIC did help them in maintaining that format when packaging up QDOS later. On Thu, May 2, 2024 at 10:38 PM CAREY SCHUG via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: 8 4-500$