On Dec 31, 2011 8:39 PM, "Tony Duell" <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
BBC BASIC was far & away the best BASIC of
the 1980s and one of the
Was it? I would claim Microware's BASIC-09 would give it serious
competition.
Both had named subprograms (procedures, whatvery you want to call them),
formal parameters and local variables.
BBC BASIC gaisn by being interpretted (so it's 'interactive', you can
try things out at the keybaord), and by having the built-in assembler
BASIC-09 gains by having user-defined types, but not requiring line
numbewrs and by being able ot call routines from other BASIC-09 files, or
from other languages.
I like them both (and they are way ahead of Microsoft's interpretted
BASIC of the time, I'll grant that).
Never even heard of that one, but then, I've never seen or used OS/9 I'm my
life. Never owned a Dragon or any other 6809 box.
I know it runs on later kit, but I fear that by the 1980s I was working
with x86 & the occasional Mac. (A tiny bit of VAX, and single one-off jobs
on a single PDP/11, a single AS/400, a single S/36, a single RTPC, etc.)
Any excursions into SPARC or anything else have been me seizing the chance
to play with something unusual... And OS/9 is just too rare. Never come
across it.