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:

    “Nothing significant was really said,
    Though all agreed the talk superb....”
    —Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    ““It looks as if
    Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
    And its eyes shut with overeagerness
    To see what people found so interesting
    In one another, and had gone to sleep
    Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
    Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
    Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)