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It was really easy in BBC Basic to drop in some inline assembler whenever you needed to. It wouldn't surprise me if Arthur was really a mix of Basic and inline
by pja 14y ago
It was really easy in BBC Basic to drop in some inline assembler whenever you needed to. It wouldn't surprise me if Arthur was really a mix of Basic and inline ARM assembler. Anyone ever seen the source code?
- ralph 14y agoThere's some confusion here. The Arthur OS ROMs, starting with 0.2 on EPROM, that's why Acorn wanted them back on the upgrade to 0.3 on ROM, were written in assembler, including `modules' like the filing systems, BASIC, and the Wimp that gave SWIs like Wimp_CreateIcon. More as a demo of WIMP rather than anything useful there was a Desktop program stored in the ROM, written in BASIC, that used the Wimp module to present a crude selection of calculator, etc. Nothing like the later drag-and-drop RISC OS desktop; no other programs could run with the Arthur version. So there was some BASIC in the OS but only as one stores sprites and other data files too. The source of RISC OS was opened up. https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/castle/RiscOS/Sources/Programmer/BASIC/s/Lexical?rev=1.6;content-type=text%2Fx-cvsweb-markup https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/castle/RiscOS/Sources... shows part of the BASIC module which has pedigree going back to when Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, wrote it.