Getting Started in BBC Basic | Hacker News Reader

Getting Started in BBC Basic

bbcmicrobot.com

77 pointsingve31 comments

I love how you could mix 6502 assembly and also create macros.

For example, you could declare something like this to move two bytes from F% to T%:

  870 DEF FNMOVW(F%,T%)
  880 [
  890 OPT pass%
  900 LDA F%
  910 STA T%
  920 LDA F%+&1
  930 STA T%+&1
  940 ]
  950 =pass%

And then reference it from somewhere else like so:

  220 OPT FNMOVW(&52,&4B)

And the resulting code would be inlined into your assembly. It made for shorter and more readable assembly.

That's amazing! I had a C64 as a kid, and never learned any real 6502 because getting beyond "flash the border a different color" was tough: I only had a machine code monitor in a cartridge, and never figured out how to load/save programs.

Being able to inline assembly would have made it so much easier to experiment and learn!

I have an Amstrad NC100 with BBC Basic for Z80 and it supports inline assembly as well. It is highly recommended to save your programs on the (optional) SRAM card before testing them though as it is so easy to reset the machine or corrupt the main memory.

I wish you could still do graphics this way on modern computers. Take Linux for example. It would be cool if I could just install command line Linux on a machine and then switch to "graphics mode" without having to install and configure a whole desktop.

I might use such a thing for some projects I'd like to build.

You can program this way anything with adafruit display. I have LilyGo T-Watch and programming graphics feels like back in the 90's :)

Is this not what Linux's Framebuffer can be used for?

I guess it is, but it seems a lot more complicated then doing...

SCREEN 1 CIRCLE 25, 25, 10

Then it seems that the framebuffer isn't enabled by default in some Linux distros, so you can't just write a command line tool that draws on the screen for whoever...

Still, maybe I'll experiment with it for a home slot machine project I'm working on.

There used to be this thing called SVGAlib in Linux...

  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <vga.h>
  
  int main(void)
  {
     vga_init();
     vga_setmode(G320x200x256);
     vga_setcolor(4);
     vga_drawpixel(10, 10);
  
     sleep(5);
     vga_setmode(TEXT);

     return EXIT_SUCCESS;
  }

Sure, not quite as simple as a BASIC program, but very familiar to those of us who grew up with BGI in Pascal or C.

Which required root to execute.

When you ran basic code you were effectively root, you could peek or poke any memory address or hardware register.

My first computer was a Timer 2068, yet there is a reason why we aren't any longer running those systems.

The most convenient graphics now is probably JavaScript and a canvas in a browser, but it is quite a lot more faff to get started than BBC BASIC was.

Funny you mention it. I actually wrote a series of books to teach total beginners programming using this method.

https://splashofcode.com

Yeah, it's a pain. I want Firefox to just come with a button that opens up a javascript console and editor with a canvas so you can start programming.

I wonder if things would be different if every web browser came with a user-friendly (and beginner-friendly) programming environment.

> The most convenient graphics now is probably JavaScript and a canvas in a browser

Really? I think most Logo derivatives, Microsoft Small Basic (Windows only), SdlBasic, QB64, and lots of others have more convenient graphics than JS with the Canvas API.

I would gladly settle for a gui terminal program that has a simple api for drawing graphics in the terminal window. Like curses but for graphics.

My very first interaction with a computer was with the BBC Basic command prompt, 30 years ago when I was 7. If it hadn't been so accessible I doubt I'd be a programmer now, so I feel like I owe it a lot!

I fondly remember the days of the BBC Microcomputer. Typing out pages of code from a book. Then after fixing all the typo's finally being able to run a simple program. Modifying games by tinkering with the code is what inspired me to become a developer.

This is so cool, I love old BASIC. It was just fun.

I learned BBC Basic. When I got to university I found it hard to unlearn line numbers. Yep, line numbers and by implication GOTO.

Also had to unlearn BBC ADFS directories. True hierarchical directories were hard to comprehend because I had learned ADFS directories, where you have 26 of them, they are single letter prefixes to files and not hierarchical.

Any talk of BASIC being useful is nonsense. BASIC was pushed on to the home micro scene by Microsoft. This held us back.

8-bit variants of BASIC introduced a generation of programmers (often kids/teenagers) to fundamental programming concepts - variables, loops, conditionals - and allowed them to easily experiment with early computer graphics and audio.

The benefits of this initial learning/experimentation vastly outweighed any bad habits picked up or 'unlearning' required.

it's not "unlearning" anyway, it's just "learning". I'm trying to imagine how many other things this person would have had to "unlearn" in tech since BBC Basic came out.

In the early days you where coding Assembly by hand loading via switches.

Microsoft got started as a language developer which made every thing a lot more accessible.

Microsoft became successful because everyone wanted BASIC, and they were the main vendor able to quickly provide compact versions for the main CPUs in use.

The idea they "pushed it" onto the home micro scene is nonsense - Microsoft was small enough to be pushed around by much larger vendors at the time, and were cheap.

Jack Tramiel at Commodore infamously received an offer for $3 per unit, and supposedly countered with a $25k offer for a perpetual license (they did end up negotiating a new agreement when releasing the C128, as the license only applied to versions of BASIC already released at the time it was entered into, but by then they'd shipped millions of units).

> where you have 26 of them, they are single letter prefixes to files and not hierarchical

ADFS supported hierarchical directories with name limits the same as files (IIRC 10 characters?).

Sounds like you are thinking of the earlier DFS.

> hard to unlearn line numbers

That seems odd. Where was your sticking point with them?

I started out with BBC BASIC, eventually with a little 6502 assembly for a few bits & bobs, and had no trouble at all seeing the benefit of dropping that bit of structure when I started tinkering with QuickBasic and then C on a PC.

In fact if you had a BBC machine new enough to support ADFS, then you had one with a BBC BASIC version that supported procedures and functions in a way that allowed line numbers to be effectively ignored (no GOTO/GOSUB needed) in many cases. In fact there were methods to write without them (write the code in a text editor, like the one built in to the Master series, I forget its name, then TYPE it from the file to "add" the line numbers for the interpreter to like).

> Any talk of BASIC being useful is nonsense. BASIC was pushed on to the home micro scene by Microsoft. This held us back.

BASIC was invented at Dartmouth in the 1960s[1] as a simplified programming language for beginners, and was well-suited to microcomputers because of its interactive user friendliness and minimal resource requirements. Microsoft deserves credit for fitting a usable computer language into a few kilobytes (!) of memory.

Alternatives such as Forth or assembly language were not as beginner friendly, and languages like Pascal or C had higher RAM and storage requirements and were not interactive like BASIC.

BBC BASIC was a powerful and friendly environment that was neither written by nor "pushed" by Microsoft. Rather, it was pushed by the BBC, resulting in a generation of computer enthusiasts and professionals.

[1] https://time.com/69316/basic/

Microsoft might not have been the one doing the pushing, but claiming the customers wanted it is only telling half the truth at best. I think it's fair to say that most customers then were unaware of the alternatives and the decision was made by the manufacturers of those home computers.

BASIC might very well have been the best choice for those casually interested in computers. Educators would have preferred others though (Pascal, Scheme and COMAL come to mind). FORTH would have scared away most customers, but amazed and inspired others (I sadly discovered it only after its prime).

Turbo Pascal didn't require (much) more memory than elaborate BASIC implementations and ran at reasonable speed even on a Z80. Not quite the same interactivity of an interpreter perhaps, but not much behind. It came late to the scene though.

Apple had a Pascal implementation, but it required floppy disks and more memory. They also had Logo and possibly other languages. Logo is an interesting alternative to BASIC since it's beginner-friendly. Microsoft (and other companies such as Digital Research et al.) supplied a number of languages other than BASIC (Pascal, Fortran, COBOL...) but they typically required more resources and were less novice-friendly.

BASIC worked out of ROM and a few kilobytes of RAM, and was easy to learn.

As you note, Turbo Pascal - a nice environment with a fast one-pass compiler - came out later. It does seem to have had a cassette version at some point, but it required more RAM than BASIC and was harder to learn. Nonetheless it was highly successful and its descendant Delphi is still used today.

It's hard to get Scheme to run in a few kilobytes, but it would be fun to try. Primitive LISPs did seem to exist on microcomputers but only gave you a few atoms and cons cells because of memory limits.

COMAL was largely based on BASIC but never caught on as widely.

In any case, I don't think Microsoft gets the credit or the blame for BBC BASIC. (There were also versions of microcomputer BASICs from companies other than Microsoft, dating to the early 1970s.)

disclaimer: I've only seen it running in an emulator like the BBC Micro bot; it looks cool though. ;-)

I found it hard to unlearn line numbers. Yep, line numbers and by implication GOTO.

BBC Basic let you very easily write structured programs without a single GOTO if you wanted.

> BASIC was pushed on to the home micro scene by Microsoft

BASIC existed on many different platforms (including mainframe and minicomputers) long before MS got in on the act (see also the sibling comment here about when BASIC was invented).

> Any talk of BASIC being useful is nonsense.

Now, this is nonsense. I started with Apple BASIC in 1979, then simply due to curiosity learned many other languages (many have fallen by the wayside, 6502, FORTH, Pascal, COBOL) and it bootstrapped my career as a software developer which I still do to this day (like many others of my generation).

All your other comments about having to "unlearn" stuff was perhaps your problem; apropos directory representations, by 1987 due to work and college I worked with multiple different OS directory mechanisms including ADFS, RDOS, AOS, VMS, CP/M, MSDOS and UNIX. Not that big of a deal and just made the week more interesting.

> I learned BBC Basic. When I got to university I found it hard to unlearn line numbers.

The problem isn't learning BASIC, it's learning it (or anything else) exclusively for a long time. I learned 8-bit microcomputer BASIC first, too (several different dialects). And then, within a handful of years of being exposed to BASIC, I also learned some Logo, quite a lot of Turbo Pascal, DOS batch programming, and probably one or two other things I'm forgetting at the moment. None of them were really hard transitions, but I was learning them when I had a concept of programming but not a completely ossified one from long and exclusive exposure to a single language family.

> Any talk of BASIC being useful is nonsense.

Of all the many languages I learned before learning assembly, unstructured BASIC did the most to prepare me for assembly, so I think it was quite useful.

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