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BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

bbcbasic.co.uk

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Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#11

Post by andyjohnson0 »

tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

Before getting my hands on a BBC Micro I'd done all my teenage programming on an Apple II - so the killer feature of BBC Basic for me was that it had a renumber command. No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120. A little thing but it felt like magic.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#13

Post by Mr-Frog »

blowski wrote: post #3

If you're teaching 10 year old kids to code, is there an advantage to using something like this over Python or JavaScript?

Maybe. Having been a 10-year old when both of these languages were available, my main goals were to make things that looked cool to share with friends and family. My dad set me up with a BASIC256 environment around the time it was released, and I liked it because it gave immediate feedback and had a built-in graphics interface.

JavaScript: Cool language, but I was not excited about all of my work happening in a web browser. I wanted to make imperative programs, but most JavaScript tutorials were focused on enabling little DOM manipulations that were not very exciting to me. Plus, the heavy focus on Async programming went over my head. If NodeJS was around when I was first dabbling with JavaScript I probably would have stuck around with it more.

Python: Probably the best thing to introduce to a kid these days, but I used a shared family Windows computer with restricted users and setting up environments and package managers was always a pain.

I ended up spending a lot of time with Scratch, mostly for the collaborative online community.

Overall my trajectory was BASIC256->Scratch->C++->Python/Java/everything else

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#14

Post by zozbot234 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #11
tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

Before getting my hands on a BBC Micro I'd done all my teenage programming on an Apple II - so the killer feature of BBC Basic for me was that it had a renumber command. No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120. A little thing but it felt like magic.

> No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120.

Line numbers are arbitrary, you can just use GOTO to jump to some out-of-line code then GOTO back at the end. It gets a bit spaghetti'ish if you do it lot, though.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#15

Post by JdeBP »

Looking at the difference page, it's not BBC BASIC as one might remember it. But that's not possible outwith actual BBC Micro hardware, complete with Kenneth Kendall's voice in ROM. And I suspect that Kenneth Kendall cannot be open sourced. (-:

It looks like it has preserved the spirit of BBC Micro development on modern platforms, though.

The use of INKEY$(-256) to determine underlying platform is amusing.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#16

Post by jimworm »

tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

Those books had tremendous impact. BBC Basic was the first programming language I ever saw, in a children's book in a library, years before I ever got to touch a PC. It made computers seem so straightforward that it felt natural to reach for one as a tool or a toy. I've only ever seen a BBC Micro in a museum.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#18

Post by JdeBP »

tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

One of the books was an entire annotated disassembly of the BASIC interpreter, if memory serves. I vaguely remember there being some sort of kerfuffle about that.

Another thing that one got: a printed circuit diagram of the machine.

As for today: One can get get an entire annotated disassembly for Elite, including the version that used the Second Processor: https://www.bbcelite.com

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#19

Post by quickthrower2 »

tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

Teletext mode (MODE 7 IIRC) was fun too!

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#20

Post by quickthrower2 »

blowski wrote: post #3

If you're teaching 10 year old kids to code, is there an advantage to using something like this over Python or JavaScript?

The advantage is the "just works, stays the same, simple base" nature of it. Web dev in the browser with JS "just works" but slowly drifts, and the base isn't simple. Even learning vanilla JS is a lot harder than BBC Basic. There is a lot less to BBC Basic. For example if I remember there is zero functional programming capability, no closures, no objects even (I think there were strings, numbers, booleans, arrays of strings, arrays of numbers, arrays of booleans, etc. very simple types).
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