EDSAC on your desk.

Dominique Cormann wrote: Yes, there are at least two ANSI standards, and one maybe-never-quite- adopted ANSI working committee standard: ANSI X3.60-1978, _American National Standard for the Programming Language Minimal Basic_. This is a *very* minimal basic, lacking things like strings and files. ANSI X3J2 working committee BASIC. AFAIK this was never officially adopted as an ANSI standard, despite the fact that the committee must've worked on it for over a decade. In _BYTE_ 1982:6 p182, you'll find Thomas Kurtz (yes, *the* Kurtz of Dartmouth) describing the draft standard as it then existed, and he actually sold a working version of this called "True BASIC". It does things in very different ways from just about every other BASIC (the string syntax is entirely different, looking more like Fortran-77 style character-addressable strings, and the math is actually *decimal* math!) ANSI X3.113-1987 "Full BASIC". I believe this to be the standard that the X3J2 committee eventually settled on. Penware's NKR BASIC claims to be an implementation of this standard, though I've never actually seen it in use. Bywater BASIC (by Ted Campbell, and often implemented on Unix-type machines by the executable "bwbasic") claims to be a superset of X3.60-1978 and a subset of X3.113-1987. It's available under the terms of the Gnu Public License. -- Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com Trailing Edge Technology Voice: 301-767-5917 7328 Bradley Blvd Fax: 301-767-5927 Bethesda, MD, USA 20817