[GTALUG] For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2019-08-14 6:34 p.m., Chris F.A. Johnson via talk wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2019, Chris F.A. Johnson via talk wrote:
> 
>>> This doesn't have the Waterloo BASIC extensions to Commodore BASIC.
>>> Too bad.
>>   ...
>    It was Northcastle Structured BASIC, and here is the article I wrote
>    on it for the TPUG Magazine:
>    https://archive.org/details/tpug-newsletter-23/page/n21

While TPUG frowns upon distributing whole disks from its library (we
still have a positive income from selling the library CD, surprisingly),
I found Northcastle Structured BASIC on another disk and uploaded it
here: https://archive.org/details/qs-alliance-T217
(it doesn't work in the in-browser emulation for some reason that may be
my fault setting up the upload)

Chris B. may be amused to see that a dedicated nerd from the Raspberry
Pi forums wrote a bignum-handling massive Fibonacci number calculator
for "classic" BASIC. Size of result limited only by available memory:
https://github.com/ZiCog/fibo_4784969/blob/master/BASIC/classic.bas

I've been spending more time with BASIC on Linux than I should recently.
Some of the actually useful BASIC interpreters include:

* BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 — http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl/ - developed
by Richard Russell, who was on the original steering committee for the
language at the BBC before Acorn made the first implementation. Only
really works from a GUI, but has some very whizzy 3D graphics routines
(as might be expected, given Richard's work in video technology).

* stardot/MatrixBrandy: Fork of Brandy BASIC V for Linux —
https://github.com/stardot/MatrixBrandy - yet another BBC BASIC
interpreter, but faster and lighter and under very active development.
BBC BASIC has proper procedures and functions and even a very few matrix
commands, as Full BASIC should. This is being developed so actively that
it's the only package I auto-update via 'git pull' every day via a cron
job. Just last week it grew full audio support overnight!

* Bas - BASIC interpreter — http://www.moria.de/~michael/bas/ - *almost*
ANSI Full BASIC interpreter. Text only. Does all the MAT matrix commands
as BASIC should, but doesn't implement decimal arithmetic. Can't quite
manage the "10PRINT" one-line in one line, though:

    10 DIM a$(2) : a$(1)="╱" : a$(2)="╲"
    20 PRINT a$(2+(rnd(101)>50)); : GOTO 20

* Decimal BASIC — https://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/ -
full ANSI BASIC with graphics and optional decimal arithmetic. English
is not the author's first language, so documentation might not be where
you'd want it.

cheers,
 Stewart