Discussion
@screwlisp hello hello
BASIC is such that many flavours, especially the 8-bit types that i deal with, do not require much porting.
i have digital archeological evidence of this, and i have experimented many times with porting BASIC from different flavours to others.
common lisp is also a good example of "bedrock computing" as @neauoire has coined the term.
i have a very interesting flight simulator type in which deals with 3 microcomputer BASICs at a time.
@dirtycommo @screwlisp @neauoire There are some things it's just impossible to do reasonably. Drawing a string of graphics shapes or playing music notes is trivial in TRS-80 CoCo, hard & very slow in most others. Do you rewrite that in assembly, or just use lowest-common-denominator terminal text?
File stuff beyond OPEN, PRINT, CLOSE is very specific, only TRS-80, Atari, & MSDOS have good random-access database tools. (but then, Lisp has very poor support for it, too!)
#basic
i suppose it is probably confined to utility tools and text editors, i will admit.
you are right that a lot of BASIC is tied to the hardware that it is running on.
the platforms i have dealt with most are variants of 8K MS BASIC, which includes the C64 and VIC-20.
i have also had dealings with Dartmouth, and also Atari BASIC.
like anything, i think it depends what you want to get out of the language, and what you want to do with it, practically.
@mdhughes @dirtycommo @screwlisp @neauoire i don't kniw much about BASIC (even tough my first computer ran it), but i am once again reminded of BASICODE, the "Esperanto for computers", an effort to standardize all the little divergent details in the language
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@dirtycommo @screwlisp @neauoire There's also been a few attempts to use only compatible BASIC in a main program, with interpreter-specific GOSUBs for the edge cases. It kinda looks bad:
10 LET R0=100
11 GOSUB 10000
12 ?"Your random number is ";R9
99 END
10000 REM Random - Atari
10001 R9=INT(RND(0)*R0)+1
10002 RETURN
Each BASIC needs either 0 or 1 in 10001, or in TinyBasicWeb & Spectrum Basic it's
10001 LET R9=INT((RND*R0+1))
Tons of that kinda fussiness.
#basic