An introduction to Programming with ECMA-55 Minimal BASIC [pdf]

It's amazing how many completely different languages are called BASIC.

Personally, I've used:

* GW-BASIC / BASICA

* QBasic / QuickBasic

* Visual Basic 6

* Visual Basic.NET

* UniVerse BASIC / Unidata BASIC - these are quite similar and both descend from Pick BASIC

Each of these is a distinctly different language with very different capabilities, but they all share the BASIC name.

That's an interesting post. Minimal BASIC really deserves its name, being quite a bit more limited than even the ZX80s or VIC-20's BASIC variants.

Especially in the educational context, this lead to a lot of languages seemingly forgotten -- BASIC being too little, and the computers not having enough power for Pascal/Algol-W/C. LOGO was quite popular, of course, but anyone remember COMAL? It had line numbers, but mostly for editing interactively. Beyond that, you had full structured programming, a decent enough allowance for variable names and a rather verbose syntax to help you remember where you are. No semicolons required, turtle graphics included in most implementations. Short example:

    0100 draw'circle(160,100,100,2)
    0110
    0120 PROC draw'circle(xc,yc,r,color)
    0130   pencolor(color)
    0140   circle(xc,yc,r)
    0150   paint(xc,yc)
    0160   IF r > 10 THEN draw'circle(xc,yc,r-10,color+1)
    0170 ENDPROC draw'circle

One of my favorite languages of that era was Elan. Which, like most others, was slightly pascal-ish, too, but introduced refinements, a feature rarely seen since (literate programming preprocessors excepted). Also allowed ample usage of spaces in identifiers.

    problem of pascal:
        read the maximum;
        start with the number 1;
        begin with the sum 0;
        WHILE number <= max
        REP add number to sum;
            take the next number;
        ENDREP;
        show the result.

    read the maximum:
        INT VAR max;
        get(max).

    start with the number 1:
        INT VAR number:: 1.

    start with the sum 0:
        INT VAR sum:: 0.

    add number to sum:
        sum := sum + number.

    take the next number:
        number := number + 1.

    show the result:
        line;
        put (sum).

We tend to do similar things with (maybe nested) functions and comments, but this puts it all on the language level, which also would make it easy to have the system prompt you for your missing refinements, and of course get by without passing parameters.

Now, replacing all that or more contemporary equivalents (like Scratch or Python) with a didactic approach that's pretty much centered on writing flowcharts beforehand is quite an idea. Which, by the way, is something we shouldn't forget when we compare languages: It's not just about its syntax alone, but how students are taught to construct and revise them. REPLs vs file-based, for example. This would have them draw the general structure and then encode that in GOTOs. I bet Dijkstra would feel torn about this…

This is fantastic. I learned to program back in the 90s using QBasic. It came with DOS and along with it a book very much like this PDF. I read through the whole book, entering every line of code in the examples, changing little pieces of it until I understood how it worked. Such good memories. I'll enjoy reading this. Thank you.

The compiler for it is quite triggering. https://buraphakit.sourceforge.io/Learn_BASIC.pdf

The Linked List example has an unbelievable number of GOTO 120 and GOSUB 380 type of statements. Even QuickBasic didn't have to do that.

Anyone recommend a good basic interpreter for Windows? Or even one that would work in Dosbox with text and graphics modes?