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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: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday June 17 2019, @03:51PM (1 child)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 17 2019, @03:51PM (#856673)

    BBC BASIC, and many that emulated it, was a perfect bridge language from literally-never-written-code-people to people directly manipulating CPUs, memory and hardware.

    To that end it included inline assembler capability - a particularly awesome feature. It allowed you to work mostly in BASIC but drop down to ASM for writing tight loops, blits, IRQ handlers, or raw IO/control stuff. Wrote an entire CAD/CAM system for robot control in it once - all the UI was in BASIC and the stepper motor driver and control stuff in inline assembler.

    Without the BASIC intro / framework I would never have got into programming that sort of stuff, way too high an entry barrier, but without the assembler capability what I/we did wouldn't have been possible, it was indeed a perfect system for its time.

    Still got the code somewhere, on fan-fold paper. No idea what it does as in those days I subscribed to stuff like "Real Programmers don't need comments -- the code is obvious." (and yeah, I know, I was using BASIC...). And comments took up valuable memory, I think, maybe. Fun times.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by BeaverCleaver on Tuesday June 18 2019, @12:24AM

    by BeaverCleaver (5841) on Tuesday June 18 2019, @12:24AM (#856845)

    I would love to see this. I started building a computer-controlled robot from the Usborne book (now available again, for free! https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-books/ [usborne.com] ) back in the day... Finishing that thing is still on my to-do list decades later. Now i can probably even afford a BBC32 to run it!