Need a BASIC expert

Eric Smith spacewar at gmail.com
Sat Apr 24 17:25:17 CDT 2021


On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 5:19 AM Bill Degnan via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> It is not too hard to imagine a professional programmer who took a copy of
> Dartmouth BASIC and adapted it for this flavor of BASIC, but I personally
> dont have any reference docs about it or proof.
>
[...]

> so it may
> simply be MINICAL BASIC would have been just as easy for a period
> programmer to whip up from scratch.
>

The latter seems far more likely. From what little is known about it, the
MINCAL architecture is apparently very dissimilar to the GE-225/235/265 or
GE-635, e.g. the MINCAL being a BCD machine, so I'd expect it would have
been much easier to write a new BASIC interpreter for the MINCAL from
scratch than to adapt it from actual Dartmouth BASIC.

Are there any known actual "ports" of Dartmouth BASIC to non-GE/Honeywell
machines, as opposed to scratch reimplementations?


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