Dominique Cormann wrote:
>William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net> wrote:
>> > BASIC RULES!
>>
>> What are the BASIC rules?
>Did they ever create a standard version of Basic like there is for C
>(ansi c)?
Yes, there are at least two ANSI standards, and one maybe-never-quite-
adopted ANSI working committee standard:
ANSI X3.60-1978, _American National Standard for the Programming Language
Minimal Basic_. This is a *very* minimal basic, lacking things like
strings and files.
ANSI X3J2 working committee BASIC. AFAIK this was never officially
adopted as an ANSI standard, despite the fact that the committee must've
worked on it for over a decade. In _BYTE_ 1982:6 p182, you'll find
Thomas Kurtz (yes, *the* Kurtz of Dartmouth) describing the draft
standard as it then existed, and he actually sold a working version of
this called "True BASIC". It does things in very different ways from
just about every other BASIC (the string syntax is entirely different,
looking more like Fortran-77 style character-addressable strings, and
the math is actually *decimal* math!)
ANSI X3.113-1987 "Full BASIC". I believe this to be the standard that
the X3J2 committee eventually settled on. Penware's NKR BASIC claims to be
an implementation of this standard, though I've never actually seen
it in use.
Bywater BASIC (by Ted Campbell, and often implemented on Unix-type
machines by the executable "bwbasic") claims to be a superset of X3.60-1978
and a subset of X3.113-1987. It's available under the terms of the Gnu
Public License.
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa_at_trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology Voice: 301-767-5917
7328 Bradley Blvd Fax: 301-767-5927
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817
Received on Mon Sep 21 1998 - 09:33:50 BST