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posted by janrinok on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the digital-archeology-now-before-its-too-late dept.

Programmer David Given has done the leg work to contact and ask R. T. Russel about releasing the Z80-based BBC BASIC as Free Software. It is now available under the non-reciprocal zlib license:

As part of the work I've been doing with cpmish I've been trying to track down the copyright holders of some of the more classic pieces of CP/M software and asking them to license it in a way that allows redistribution. One of the people I contacted was R.T. Russell, the author of the classic Z80 BBC BASIC, and he very kindly sent me the source and agreed to allow it to be distributed under the terms of the zlib license. So it's now open source!

[...] So the reason why this is important is that BASIC has, rightly, a reputation for being a pretty terrible language; but BBC BASIC was a dialect specifically commissioned by the BBC in 1981 as an educational aid. As a result, BBC BASIC supports named procedures, local variables, recursion, and other structured programming features. Unlike Microsoft BASIC, you can write proper structured, maintainable programs in BBC BASIC without needing to refer to any line numbers anywhere. And it'll run faster that way: [...]

[...] The original version was written by Sophie Wilson at Acorn in 1981 for their 6502-based range of BBC Micro computers and during the early eighties every school child in the United Kingdom was exposed to it, spawning a whole generation of bedroom programmers.

Earlier on SN:

[Ed's Comment: 170619-0724UTC. Added additional link to the original story]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @03:43AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @03:43AM (#856488)

    Years ago, I stumbled across a book in the local library that was written by the original creators of BASIC. “Back to BASIC: The History, Corruption, and Future of the Language.” As a child who grew up with 8-bits and their embedded BASICs, it was a real eye-opener.

    Executive Summary: That crap-mess you grew up with was a severely limited, crippled, stupidization of actual BASIC. You poor innocents were the victims of others shoe-horning something that sorta looked like BASIC into a tiny ROM. And just about every gripe you had with BASIC was due to those shoe-horned limitations, not BASIC as it was supposed to be.

    All that aside, awesome that this source code could see light of day. Crippled as they were, the shoe-horning was no easy feat.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Monday June 17 2019, @04:01AM

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 17 2019, @04:01AM (#856494)

    .You poor innocents were the victims of others shoe-horning something that sorta looked like BASIC into a tiny ROM.

    Typical versions of Microsoft BASIC were distributes on an 8K ROM, Microsoft Extended BASIC was 12K.

    BBC BASIC (the original 6502 version), came on a 16K ROM. No wonder it was a more complete programming language.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @03:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @03:14AM (#858412)

    Reposting under the right comment.

    http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf [bitsavers.org] [bitsavers.org]

    That's a BASIC manual (not specification) from 1964, for the original BASIC implementation. Page 4-5 say (of the first example program) "all lines in the program start with a line number...we use only capital letters...spaces may be used, or not used, at will..."