And you thought BASIC was a bad language?

But BASIC was fun, especially on some of the 8-bit microcomputers of the 1980s. Most of these machines had BASIC in ROM and within three seconds after you switched the machine on, you were greeted with a prompt and you were ready to type in a BASIC program. On some machines, like the ZX-Spectrum or the BBC Micro you were immediately ready to enter commands to draw lines on the screen.

• Read about CERBERUS-2080, a modern 8-bit home computer that can run BASIC.
• Read about the first computer our family had, the TI-99/4A.
• Read about one of the first programs I ever wrote, to compute the day of the week. for any given date.
• See my story about the xor-lines pattern.
• Read the story of BASICODE, a pioneering achievement in program portability of the Dutch radio. This was back in the old days of 8-bit machines with cassette storage and awkward BASIC dialects.

When you run Linux, you can choose between quite a few BASIC interpreters that are written by amateurs. But, when I wrote my own Basic interpreter in 1997, none of these came close to QBASIC under MSDOS 6.22. They were either buggy or incomplete or slow. Did you ever notice that bwbasic is so awfully slow? If you are accustomed to an old Commodore 64, probably not. But on a Pentium it ought to be at least 2 orders of magnitude faster! My attempt to write a BASIC interpreter is still very unfinished, but it is fast!. You can download it here. This is distributed under the GNU General Public License. It offers most functionality of BWBASIC, except PRINT USING and random access files. In the long run it should have offered much more, but it was never developed further. Twenty years later, I had to add an extra include line to the main C source file to make it compile, but after that it will run and pass the regression test on a modern 64-bit Linux system.

In the meantime, many different Basic versions have been developed, including some open source versions that will run under Linux. Some versions I tried are:

• bas, written by Michael Haardt. This comes close to the syntax of the Microsoft Basics of the 1980s. It even has support for binary random access files (with FIELD, LSET and RSET commands). It also supports block structures like DO..WHILE..LOOP, IF..THEN..ELSE..ENDIF end SELECT..CASE. It also supports named subroutines and functions with parameters, but not the full semantics. For one thing. parameters are always passed by value and not by reference as ANSI Basic (and QBASIC) do. It has no graphics support, but it has some terminal control. It also supports some BBC-Basic constructs (DEFPROC, multi-line DEFFFN, REPEAT..UNTIL), so it may be easy to port some BBC Basic programs to it. The real nice thing is that it supports matrix operations as most Basic on mainframes did before the age of microcomputers.
• yabasic.. It is a fairly full-featured Basic interpreter with control structures and named subroutines. It also supports graphics. But its syntax deviates from any other BASIC versions in many areas. It has multi-line IF statements, but if you want a single-line IF statement (without ENDIF), you must not use the word THEN. This means that even trivial programs (that would run unmodified between BBC Basic and Microsoft Basic) need to be adapted.
• Brandy, a clone of BBC Basic. I picked Matrix Brandy as it runs better on my 64-bit Linux system than the regular version. It supports graphics as found on the RISC PC (but not all of it), no sound and of course it has no built-in assembler and it can't run machine code. Other than that it is a fairly full-featured interpreter, with RETURN parameters and array operations, as you find them on the Risc PC.
• Needless to say, R.T. Russell, author of the Z-80 version of BBC Basic and of BBC Basic for Windows, has released a free portable version of BBC Basic, called BBC Basic for SDL2.0. This is a very full-featured version, complete with graphics, sound and a built-in assembler and it's from ter original author of many BBC Basic ports.

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