am1933 Posted February 17, 2014 Share Posted February 17, 2014 I was messing about with my BBC micro today and something occured to me about some of the commands, The BBC uses a CALL statement in basic to transfer control to a machine code subroutine, it also has a DEF function for defining a subroutine-that also lets you call the routine at anytime by name from anywhere in the program. I started having a look through the BBC users guide and found the manual refers to BBC basic as an "Extended Basic"!!!!! Could it be that a machine that was for years-thought of as having the best version of Basic to be found on any home micro-could have actually taken a few bits'n'pieces from our beloved TI Extended Basic? For reference-I understand that TI Extended Basic appeared around June 1981 and the BBC micro (which had an incredibly short development time)was released to the public around December 1981. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OX. Posted February 17, 2014 Share Posted February 17, 2014 (edited) I would have thought that the term "extended basic" came about to describe a version of the language that came with an extended set of commands to the original Dartmouth Basic spec rather than TI setting some de-facto standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC Edited February 17, 2014 by OX. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted February 17, 2014 Share Posted February 17, 2014 TI kept with the ANSI standard, which was kind of neat, because when I had to take programming in college for a natural science requirement I was amazed to see the language used on the PR1ME mainframe at the college was REAL FAMILIAR! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted February 18, 2014 Share Posted February 18, 2014 'CALL {address}' was the standard in Microsoft BASIC for linking to assembly programs - most BASICs preferred compatibility with MS BASIC over ANSI BASIC. So, not really a relation to ours. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
2600problems Posted April 5, 2017 Share Posted April 5, 2017 TI basic is slow to type, slow to execute...just slow in general Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mizapf Posted April 5, 2017 Share Posted April 5, 2017 It was possibly the best and only way to implement TI BASIC with the given resources in the stock console. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 I'm not convinced there's ever only one way to implement software. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RXB Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 Stock Console has NO RAM and only VDP memory, so TI Basic was a total compromise to reality of the design lacking real RAM. 256 byte of RAM was put to use for making TI Basic work and you have to admit considering the insane design it did still sell. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 It sold primarily because of the respected TI name at the time. And it did look cool with its aluminum cover I recently acquired a BBC Master computer, and it is such an advanced computer compared to the TI even though it was its contemporary that it makes you wonder what the TI engineers were smoking when they designed the 99/4... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RXB Posted April 6, 2017 Share Posted April 6, 2017 (edited) I was messing about with my BBC micro today and something occured to me about some of the commands, The BBC uses a CALL statement in basic to transfer control to a machine code subroutine, it also has a DEF function for defining a subroutine-that also lets you call the routine at anytime by name from anywhere in the program. I started having a look through the BBC users guide and found the manual refers to BBC basic as an "Extended Basic"!!!!! Could it be that a machine that was for years-thought of as having the best version of Basic to be found on any home micro-could have actually taken a few bits'n'pieces from our beloved TI Extended Basic? For reference-I understand that TI Extended Basic appeared around June 1981 and the BBC micro (which had an incredibly short development time)was released to the public around December 1981. This from the RXB source code that is modified for RXB and I never took out a single thing, but added my stuff and kept the original code as comments. [2001] *********************************************************** [2002] * SUBPROGRAM FOR VERSION [2003] *********************************************************** [2004] AA1F 06,A9,F6 VERS CALL COMB Insure have left parenthesis [2005] AA22 06,AD,AF CALL ERRC05 Get symbol information [2006] *---------------------------------------------------------- [2007] * Change version number to 110 6/16/1981 [2008] AA25 BF,4A,07 DST 2015,@FAC 8/17/2014 AA28 DF [2009] AA29 0F,80 XML CIF Convert to floating point [2010] *---------------------------------------------------------- [2011] AA2B 51,B8 BR ASSRTN Assign and return to caller Edited April 6, 2017 by RXB Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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