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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

#91

Post by rahimnathwani »

vram22 wrote: post #90
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…

>- integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily Yes, as easily as this: some BASIC statements here [ some assembly statements here ] some BASIC statements here IOW, you just had to enclose your assembly language statements in square brackets. That's it. Of course, you would need to know what memory addresses to operate on, in a real-life program, as opposed to a demo, so that you could shar…

On your last point: on the first pass the assembler wouldn't know about labels that came later on the assembly, but on the second pass it would have seen them. IIRC normal way to run the assembler was to do to a for loop from 0 to 3 with step size 3, as 0 indicated suppressing all assembler errors.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#92

Post by rahimnathwani »

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…

The day my dad brought home my Acorn Electron was a great day indeed. Closely followed by the day I got a tape recorder and DIN to 3.5mm/2.5mm cable.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#93

Post by rahimnathwani »

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?

A 10 year old might have more fun remixing games on PICO-8 or TIC-80. Or creating games with Octostudio.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#94

Post by vram22 »

icosian wrote: post #29
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…

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me. Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and pla…

>Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer.

Can you explain this? Do you mean that BASIC programs were encoded as sound in some way, and then could be uploaded into the computer and run?

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#96

Post by tabtab »

mrlonglong wrote: post #52
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.

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.

The nice thing about line numbers is that you didn't have to learn a different code editor for different computer brands. I could walk up to any computer that had BASIC in a department store, and program up my favorite childish prank on every brand:

         10 PRINT "This computer is overheated."
         20 PRINT "WARNING: Computer about to EXPLODE!..."
         30 GO TO 10
         RUN
Newbies walking up saw the active screen, got wide-eyed and walked away quickly. One even called security, as I watched from a distance. Good times!

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#97

Post by justinlloyd »

vram22 wrote: post #94
icosian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me. Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and pla…

>Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer. Can you explain this? Do you mean that BASIC programs were encoded as sound in some way, and then could be uploaded into the computer and run?

Yes. That's exactly it. Just like an acoustic modem. And also how software and data was stored on compact audio cassette when disk drives (the floppy kind, not the hard kind) were too expensive or out of reach of the average person.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#98

Post by cdcarter »

zozbot234 wrote: post #75
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.

Would BBC Basic need much more than something like a BIOS setup screen?

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#99

Post by justinlloyd »

gadders wrote: post #66
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 other big difference with BBC Basic was that it had functions. The other version of Basic I used only had Subroutines accessed via Gosub.

Not just functions, but procedures too, and local variables. DEF PROC, DEF FN, and LOCAL.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#100

Post by cracoucax »

vram22 wrote: post #94
icosian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me. Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and pla…

>Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer. Can you explain this? Do you mean that BASIC programs were encoded as sound in some way, and then could be uploaded into the computer and run?

Never used a BBC but 8bit computers of this era often used cassettes to load and save data.

The tape would contain bleeps and blurps which would be decoded into bytes by the computer. EG this is the sound produced by an Amstrad cpc464 loading a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvChkOHgDIo

This meant that to copy software you didn't even need a computer, just a double cassette deck.

And that by recording the credits of this BBC show to tape and playing that back into the computer you'd load some program. That's actually a brilliant idea, I wonder what kind of software they broadcasted.

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