[HN Gopher] PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC
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       PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC
        
       Author : tie-in
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2024-07-12 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (robhagemans.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (robhagemans.github.io)
        
       | fritzy wrote:
       | There's similar projects like QB64 and L-Basic. I have to wonder
       | if keeping language variants alive will be of historic
       | significance hundreds of years from now. Will anyone care about
       | early computing to this extent?
        
         | fuzztester wrote:
         | There are quite a few other BASICs. FreeBASIC, PureBASIC, etc.
         | 
         | See:
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_programming_l...
         | 
         | and
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BASIC_interpreters
         | 
         | Some will be obsolete, of course.
        
       | hulitu wrote:
       | > PC-BASIC, a cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC
       | 
       | Can it run nibbles ?
        
         | CTOSian wrote:
         | nibbles is a QBASIC program..
        
         | fuzztester wrote:
         | donkey?
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | > It runs ASCII, tokenized and protected BASIC programs and
       | supports the Microsoft Binary Format for full interchangeability
       | of data files.
       | 
       | I wonder, does that possibly include QBasic binary format? I have
       | a couple hundred games I wrote as a kid in this format that I
       | have yet to automate a fix for.
       | 
       | I also have an outstanding Stack Overflow question about the
       | process.
       | 
       | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53051061/convert-from-qb...
        
         | Suppafly wrote:
         | You posted that 5 years ago, you should have been able to
         | manually do it all by now :)
         | 
         | Someone on the retrocomputing stackoverflow also asked a
         | similar question, although the suggestion seemed to be to load
         | it in qbasic and resave it back to ascii.
        
       | jll29 wrote:
       | I got to re-appreciate BASIC when evaluating options for teaching
       | 11-year-old kids a bit how to program (in a single session).
       | 
       | People recommended Scratch etc. but I felt talking about programs
       | was important also, which is easier when you write textual
       | statements. At some point, I briefly considered using an emulated
       | BASIC due to the simplicity and built in graphic, but I ended up
       | using Python together with the pyturtle library for LOGO-like
       | graphics, because the main exercise was to let kids draw a house
       | on paper and then ask them to generate the drawing commands (also
       | first on paper). Using Python has the advantage that nothing they
       | learned was "wasted" or "academic use only" - you can immediately
       | build on or monetize Python knowledge.
       | 
       | Interpreted BASIC certainly is a development forward from
       | compiled FORTRAN from a didactic point of view.
        
       | incanus77 wrote:
       | The wildest part of this excellent software is that you can feed
       | it WAV files of tape-recorded BASIC programs and it can decipher
       | them.
        
         | cubano wrote:
         | No...the REAL wildest part of this is that I am old enough to
         | have sat in a Radio Shack window display and using a TRS-80 and
         | TANDY-BASIC I believe it was (?), and actually saved and loaded
         | my attempts at writing games using a off-the-shelf Radio Shack
         | cassette drive and a funky interface cord
         | 
         | OMG the crazy headaches that setup gave me...of course if you
         | didn't actually press PLAY on the unit at the right moment
         | after you typed LOAD in BASIC, the thing would hang...and to be
         | honest...it loaded so slow that it often seemed like it hung
         | when it didnt, thereby AT LEAST quadrupling the fun (not).
         | 
         | One thing good did come of it...I never once cursed at 5 1/4
         | floppies as they were a godsend compared to the cassette drive
         | days
         | 
         | ...and while your at it, get THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
        
       | msla wrote:
       | There's also Bywater BASIC, which apparently isn't being
       | developed anymore:
       | 
       | https://github.com/nerun/bwbasic
       | 
       | (It's also in the repos of many major Linux distributions as
       | bwbasic.)
       | 
       | A blog post where the developer comments on it a bit:
       | 
       | https://virtuallyfun.com/2010/06/09/bywater-basic/
        
       | 32bitkid wrote:
       | For a while, I was using PC-BASIC to generate audio files for the
       | IBM PCjr cassette interface to do some more diagnostics, for a
       | machine that I had that didn't have a working disk drive. I don't
       | even know if there is anything else out there to generate those
       | at this point. PC-BASIC is great!
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-12 23:00 UTC)