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That's kind of how my old MSX was, essentially a MS Basic shell that you could program on. If you wanted to run a compiled program (a game, who are we kidding?)
by ihaveajob 10y ago
That's kind of how my old MSX was, essentially a MS Basic shell that you could program on. If you wanted to run a compiled program (a game, who are we kidding?), you used Basic to bootstrap the load and replace itself with whatever the tape had. Good times.
- jhbadger 10y agoThat was pretty much how most 8-bit computers worked -- the user interface upon bootup was the Basic interpreter.
- int_19h 10y agoSome vestiges of that persisted for much longer. For example, QBasic, and even VB for DOS, still had the FILES command. Which, as you'd expect, produced the list of files in the current directory - except it didn't return it, but simply printed it out to the console. So it was something rather useless in an application, but handy in a shell. Less obvious things were having a variety of filesystem-related functionality as built-in statements with special syntax, rather than functions. For example, renaming a file: NAME "foo" AS "bar".