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 computedGOSUB) - 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
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