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

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