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Comment by casey2 | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects

I find it weird that that list is titled "BASIC dialects" but then lists implementations. There are a couple dozen implementations of the Microsoft BASIC dialect (and another half dozen BASICA), for instance.

They are all different though, depending on the hardware. Microsoft's BASIC on the C64 and on the mac and on all other platforms were different enough to count as different dialects, certainly more than just different implementations.

Edit: And the wikipedia page clusters them nicely in a separate group, what more could you ask for.

I think you missed my point. Microsoft BASIC is a dialect consisting of a couple dozen BASIC implementations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC

And clicking any of those will list them as a "Microsoft BASIC" dialect. This list lists them independently as their own dialects. I just found that slightly humorous. It wasn't intended as anything more.

If you want to be serious about it, I agree with you. Each of those is different enough that they certainly could be considered their own languages and "Microsoft BASIC" a superset (akin to Pascal, Ada, Oberon, Modula, etc all being "Wirth-languages") vs "dialect".

Love that compilers are also listed.

Original BASIC was compiled, sometimes I wonder if those 8 bit machines also had compilers available, how that would have impacted the use of BASIC, versus the BASIC vs Assembly duality of the time.

Sort of?

I remember instructions from a magazine on how to enter a line of BASIC code, then peek at a particular series of locations in memory, write those down, then make use of that code in lieu of the original BASIC code inside the original BASIC program --- used it for loops inside a game for updating the screen and polling the keyboard.

Isn't really the same though, that would be like using MS-DOS debug instead of proper compiler.

That's why I said:

>Sort of?

Back in the days of floppy disks and cassette tapes and 16--64KB memory spaces it was pretty hard to run into a real performance issue aside from games or sorting.

For the former, converting the inner loops as I described seemed to work, and I suppose it would have at least helped to some degree on the latter.

That said, yes, all the cool stuff was in assembly, and that lasted through to the early GUI days to some degree --- my favourite word-processor was WriteNow for the Mac/NeXT, ~100,000 lines of assembler.

I wonder if those 8 bit machines also had compilers available

They did.

ZX Spectrum family certainly did not had any usable one, and the few attempts that existed weren't usable over raw Z80, due to the code quality and having to deal with the memory space that was anyway reserved for the builtin interpreter.

I don't remember if the CP/M offering for the 128K +3A had any compiler available, but I only knew one person with such a model, thus I never really tried out myself.

I always regretted that though I got a cassette copy of Pascal for the TRS-80, I was unaware of their being a patch to make it work in TRS-DOS.

Anyone, here's an example of one compiler for an 8-bit machine:

http://www.trs-80.org/pascal-80/

Indeed. I remember CBASIC, a compiled basic for CP/M systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBASIC

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