I have a bad memory, but I remember distinctly showing my Gran a text adventure I'd made in BBC Basic at the age of about 14. I can imgaine now she had no idea what I was talking about, but she was very nice about it!
BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
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Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#52The 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.
I absolutely hated line numbers. In my current paid job I'm paid to develop Visual Basic applications, not a single line number in sight. Basic has certainly come a long way since the 80s.
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#53The 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…
> instant-on Sometimes replaced with a smoke screen at this age: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU55-7dWMi0
Mine did that some time ago. I've put it into storage for when I can afford to have it recapped and reconditioned.
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#54What things would be the most fun, most edifying, and most hacky to do with these? Any blog or book recommendations?
This is a google webcache link - because there is zero chance the original site will stand up - but it contains PDFs of BBC Basic books from the '80s which have entered public domain.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4YHOl0l...
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#55The 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…
> The nostalgia for me around the language is strong Same here. I cut my programming teeth on BBC Basic and later 6502 assembly, initially on an Electron, then the Model Bs at school, and we later had a Master 128 at home. The integrated multi-pass assembler was a godsend for someone who got to the point of wanting to play around at a lower level, but before getting to that stage the language had other things that se…
The name lookup routine is "Find name in catalogue" here: https://archive.org/details/BBCMicroCompendium/page/314/mode...
There's no obvious length check. I guess the actual limit will be 255 or 254 characters, maybe minus a bit if the info block has any extra data.
EDIT: previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246063
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#56The 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…
Are there any instant on/boot to REPL systems available today?
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#57Site is hugged to death:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231129084247/https://www.bbcba...
Edit: Here's the open source on GitHub:
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#58What things would be the most fun, most edifying, and most hacky to do with these? Any blog or book recommendations?
Fun/edifying: https://xr.bbcmic.ro/ Dominic Pajak's VR BBC Micro???
Blog: https://blog.mousefingers.com/ Paul Malin posted a bunch of hints on how to do the demoscene-ish things we do with the bbcmicrobot (ex-twitter, now mastodon)
The stardot forums have everything: https://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/ lots of lore on how to do stuff, plus old posts with manuals and books for the BBC Micro, including the Acorn GXR ROM manual for the extended graphics routines
I've been doing BBC Microbot posts since the start of the pandemic, after not having touched a beeb since maybe 1988. When I'm doing this stuff it does feel like a lot of lore is beyond the horizon of online history, like doing graphics without matrix multiplication - so eg https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/ talks about bayer dithering etc algorithms that are too much code, so is https://extremelearning.com.au/a-simple-method-to-construct-..., but it at least led me to the right search terms to get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-discrepancy_sequence#Addit... which does let you dither in very little code https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/111/444/4... - and that's before digging into the specifics of the machine. A lot of the better tricks I see others do on the beeb involve knowing things about its memory layout, 6502 assembler and so on, I think I'd need to spend ages reading the back issue magazines of the 80s on archive.org to get up to speed on all this - it's just not collected anywhere any more
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#59The 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…
Are there any instant on/boot to REPL systems available today?
MicroPython on a raspberry pi, pyboard, esp, etc.
Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
#60If you're teaching 10 year old kids to code, is there an advantage to using something like this over Python or JavaScript?
Then you can try out this teaching and learning language, which runs in the browser and is a bit like the old home computer BASIC versions.