23 Apr
2023
23 Apr
'23
3:54 p.m.
On Apr 22, 2023, at 9:15 AM, Mark Matlock
<mark(a)matlockfamily.com> wrote:
Oleg,
Thanks again for making this Basic-11 distribution available for RSX11M / RSX11D / IAS
!!!
This has been something I have been trying to find for years. That is the DEC Basic-11
interpreter for RSX. Also, the patches that you made to make it Y2K compatible is a
bonus.
The BasicPlus2 compiler is very full featured but to run a Basic program it has to
compile it
internally first. Having the same Basic-11 as RT-11 is really nice to have.
I haven't seen the RSX version, but I know RT-11 BASIC. It's worth noting that
it's a very different language than BASIC-PLUS or BP2. It's much closer to
"plain old BASIC.
The implementation is also very different from BASIC-PLUS let alone BP2. BASIC-PLUS
compiles to byte code ("push-pop code") so it's fairly fast yet simple to
implement. BP2 is of course a full compiler with all that implies. BASIC-11 converts the
source code to tokens but does no other processing on it (so the "LIST" command
is done by converting that token sequence back into source text). So it's a classic
interpreter, doing a full parse at runtime.
There are other obvious differences, like a max line number of 65532 rather than 32767.
paul