BASIC09 - Significant Features

Significant Features

  • reasonably structured control flow provisions (e.g., line numbers were mainly needed for computed GOTO, as BASIC09 did not have a switch/case statement, or computed GOSUB)
  • structure declaration (rare in any BASIC variant then; more common now)
  • intrinsic integer and Boolean data types
  • more than two significant characters in variable names (some BASICs of the time allowed only 1(!), many Microsoft BASIC variants allowed only 2)
  • procedures with local variables (indeed, all variables in BASIC09 are local to procedures) and parameter passing by reference
  • a reasonable debugger (its only significant drawback was that one could not examine the contents of fields in structures)
  • a way to interface to machine language code, which could be passed parameters using the BASIC09 calling sequence
  • automatic prettyprinting of source, which enforced a standard layout and avoided the ghastly mess that was the usual appearance of a program of any size in the interpreted BASICs of the time. Programmers normally would cram as many lines together as possible to avoid line number memory overhead—not a problem in BASIC09

Read more about this topic:  BASIC09

Famous quotes containing the words significant and/or features:

    “The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.”
    —W.H. (Wystan Hugh)

    “However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
    —Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)