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There are some shitty BASICs. TRS-80 Level I was very limited, and BASIC V2 on the C64 was only barely adequate - anything and everything interesting required

There are some shitty BASICs. TRS-80 Level I was very limited, and BASIC V2 on the C64 was only barely adequate - anything and everything interesting required myriad PEEKs and POKEs. I also pity anyone who tried to do anything with Intellivision ECS BASIC. Then you have your awesome BASICs like IBM Cassette BASIC, GW-BASIC, QB, and BBC Basic.

timbit42 4y ago
Of the ROM BASICs, I'd say Amstrad BASIC is even better than BBC BASIC. The BASIC on the Commodore 128 is pretty good but a bit sluggish. TRS-80 Level I was limited because it was essentially Tiny BASIC with floating point added. Level II BASIC was Microsoft BASIC. The Apple II initially came with Woz's Integer BASIC in ROM. It was better than TRS-80 Level I BASIC, unless you needed floating point. The Apple II Plus had Microsoft 6502 BASIC in ROM. It was essentially the same BASIC that Commodore used in the VIC-20 and 64, except Apple added a few graphics commands to theirs and Commodore added the screen editor. The Apple II and Commodore 64 ran at about the same clock speed, so when you benchmark their Microsoft 6502 BASICs, they're pretty much identical in speed.
jll29 4y ago
The C64's BASIC V2 had no graphics or sound commands, which was a massive draw-back on the one hand; on the other hand, it pushed lots of teenagers into learning machine code. For lack of an assembler, the initial way to use it was to hand-compute the op codes and put them into BASIC's "Data" directives, which you could read in a loop and store in some free area using POKE and then call from BASIC with the SYS command. One wrong number and the whole thing hangs, reset, type it all in again or load from a music cassette if you were lucky and had stored a recent version on tape (which took many minutes to read back in whilst giving various beeping sounds).

timbit42 4y ago

Of the ROM BASICs, I'd say Amstrad BASIC is even better than BBC BASIC. The BASIC on the Commodore 128 is pretty good but a bit sluggish. TRS-80 Level I was limited because it was essentially Tiny BASIC with floating point added. Level II BASIC was Microsoft BASIC. The Apple II initially came with Woz's Integer BASIC in ROM. It was better than TRS-80 Level I BASIC, unless you needed floating point. The Apple II Plus had Microsoft 6502 BASIC in ROM. It was essentially the same BASIC that Commodore used in the VIC-20 and 64, except Apple added a few graphics commands to theirs and Commodore added the screen editor. The Apple II and Commodore 64 ran at about the same clock speed, so when you benchmark their Microsoft 6502 BASICs, they're pretty much identical in speed.

jll29 4y ago

The C64's BASIC V2 had no graphics or sound commands, which was a massive draw-back on the one hand; on the other hand, it pushed lots of teenagers into learning machine code. For lack of an assembler, the initial way to use it was to hand-compute the op codes and put them into BASIC's "Data" directives, which you could read in a loop and store in some free area using POKE and then call from BASIC with the SYS command. One wrong number and the whole thing hangs, reset, type it all in again or load from a music cassette if you were lucky and had stored a recent version on tape (which took many minutes to read back in whilst giving various beeping sounds).