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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

#71

Post by tetrep »

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…

While it's far from the same, I see a lot of similarities with modern web browsers (and part of why I love to play with them):

- Instant-on - You hit F12 and in less than a second you've got an IDE with a REPL

- Integrated assembler - While I don't think you can inline it, WASM is really easily used: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Loading...

- Great documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

- Way too much access to hardware: I wish browsers had less access to hardware due to privacy and security, and I don't know how low level the APIs get, but it's something you can play around with as a random person with a web browser, so that's neat.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#73

Post by shrubble »

stefanv wrote: post #56
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…

Are there any instant on/boot to REPL systems available today?

The Maximite , you can load on a Raspberry Pi Pico or buy the hardware... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximite

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#74

Post by bee_rider »

zozbot234 wrote: post #14
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dijkstra ruined programming. >:(

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#75

Post by zozbot234 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #72

Would be cool to see this or any BASIC shipped as a UEFI binary. Drop it into your EFI partition, now you can easily (well easily, depending on your firmware's implementation of EFI boot menu) boot your PC as a hyper-powerful Commodore 64. Ridiculous.

Unfortunately the graphical capabilities of standard EFI are just too limited. You do get a graphical framebuffer and keyboard/mouse (which lets you do fancy BIOS setup screens) but that's pretty much it. So you're way better off booting some standard OS with a good collection of device drivers and running BASIC on top of that.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#77

Post by WillAdams »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #69

That is pretty cool, I am traveling without laptop but I just tried it on an iPad. My first computer was a PDP-8 single board that I had to program in octal (but I wrote an assembler on my company’s Dec-10, so slightly civilized). Later I bought serial number 71 Apple II and loved the built in basic. Older HN readers might have run across my open source Land of the Dwarf adventure game, and I wrote the shitty little…

Please write up a bit about the chess program and share it at:

https://www.folklore.org/index.py

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#79

Post by marbletiles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #50
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…

The integrated assembler was very good. I worked for Acorn in the early 80s (was co-author of Acorn ISO Pascal), and we used our own H/W and S/W for all software development. ISO Pascal came in two 16K ROMS, one holding the compiler (in VM code), and one everything else (virtual machine, screen editor, Pascal libraries etc) which was all written in assembler using BBC Basic. The combination of BASIC with the basic ab…

There's no contact in your profile so I'll say it here: Thank you! That work had a big impact on me when I was getting started and I still think of the B incredibly fondly.
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