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tomalpha | 2 years ago

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were:

- instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language

- integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily

- great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC Micro's case also many television shows from the BBC.

- direct access to hardware - I realise this isn't BBC Basic itself really, but being able to PEEK and POKE (well, use ? and ! operators) to memory-mapped hardware addresses was great fun, and a great way to learn about how things worked.

The nostalgia for me around the language is strong, but without the hardware platform I'm not sure I'd want to go back to it.

discuss

order

HarHarVeryFunny|2 years ago

The integrated assembler was very good. I worked for Acorn in the early 80s (was co-author of Acorn ISO Pascal), and we used our own H/W and S/W for all software development. ISO Pascal came in two 16K ROMS, one holding the compiler (in VM code), and one everything else (virtual machine, screen editor, Pascal libraries etc) which was all written in assembler using BBC Basic.

The combination of BASIC with the basic ability to have inline assembly was very convenient - just use a BASIC for loop for two-pass assembly, use CHAIN to split source into multiple files, etc.

bonaldi|2 years ago

There's no contact in your profile so I'll say it here: Thank you! That work had a big impact on me when I was getting started and I still think of the B incredibly fondly.

rahimnathwani|2 years ago

The day my dad brought home my Acorn Electron was a great day indeed. Closely followed by the day I got a tape recorder and DIN to 3.5mm/2.5mm cable.

dspillett|2 years ago

> The nostalgia for me around the language is strong

Same here. I cut my programming teeth on BBC Basic and later 6502 assembly, initially on an Electron, then the Model Bs at school, and we later had a Master 128 at home.

The integrated multi-pass assembler was a godsend for someone who got to the point of wanting to play around at a lower level, but before getting to that stage the language had other things that set it far apart from other micros of the era:

• Better structured programming constructs: proper procedures and functions where some other 8-bit BASIC implementations had nothing beyond GOTO/GOSUB. With a little hoop jump you could completely do away with line numbers.

• Long variable names, where some implementations only allowed two, or even just one, character. This allowed code to be a little more self-documenting. IIRC it only considered the first 40 characters⁰ despite not erroring when there were more though, so if you used anything longer one variable could silently clobber another.

----

[0] but who was using such long names in the limited memory¹ of an 8-bit home micro?!

[1] I did actually write something a bit akin to modern JS minimisers, to make things fit in the smaller model A² machines: it removed REM statements and did a fairly naive scan-then-search-and-replace to replace long names with shorter ones

[2] these had only 16KB rather than 32, which after taking out screen memory and other standard allocations were taken out didn't leave a lot of room for your code to live in

icosian|2 years ago

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me.

Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer.

darreninthenet|2 years ago

One of the shows also did an experiment of downloading software from the screen itself - you sent off for a little box which I think (it's been a while!) plugged into the Beeb's serial port, fired up a bit of software and just before the end of the show they'd put a little square graphic overlay over the broadcast in the bottom left hand corner.

That was your queue to literally physically stick the box over that square on the screen and then a few minutes later during the end credits that square would turn into what would look like to the human eye just plain old static but to the sensor in the box stuck over it, it was reading it as a datastream that the software would interpret and save.

To be honestly it wasn't terribly reliable, I think we got it to work maybe once or twice in the few times they did it but was an interesting experiment by the BBC back in the 80s!

zozbot234|2 years ago

The Internet Archive should have the cassette software as well, although some of it might be hidden from view due to copyright concerns.

vram22|2 years ago

>Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer.

Can you explain this? Do you mean that BASIC programs were encoded as sound in some way, and then could be uploaded into the computer and run?

andyjohnson0|2 years ago

Before getting my hands on a BBC Micro I'd done all my teenage programming on an Apple II - so the killer feature of BBC Basic for me was that it had a renumber command. No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120. A little thing but it felt like magic.

mrlonglong|2 years ago

I absolutely hated line numbers. In my current paid job I'm paid to develop Visual Basic applications, not a single line number in sight. Basic has certainly come a long way since the 80s.

zozbot234|2 years ago

> No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120.

Line numbers are arbitrary, you can just use GOTO to jump to some out-of-line code then GOTO back at the end. It gets a bit spaghetti'ish if you do it lot, though.

bartread|2 years ago

Possibly this would be more up your alley in that case: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/.

I must admit, I feel somewhat similarly to you. I want to prod at the hardware and write some assembly code. Whereas if I wanted to work with SDL there are better ways for me to do that.

With that being said, BBC Basic was a great entry point into programming for a lot of people and it's perhaps the case that it could still be so, so I do appreciate the fact this project exists.

tetrep|2 years ago

While it's far from the same, I see a lot of similarities with modern web browsers (and part of why I love to play with them):

- Instant-on - You hit F12 and in less than a second you've got an IDE with a REPL

- Integrated assembler - While I don't think you can inline it, WASM is really easily used: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Loading...

- Great documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

- Way too much access to hardware: I wish browsers had less access to hardware due to privacy and security, and I don't know how low level the APIs get, but it's something you can play around with as a random person with a web browser, so that's neat.

JdeBP|2 years ago

One of the books was an entire annotated disassembly of the BASIC interpreter, if memory serves. I vaguely remember there being some sort of kerfuffle about that.

Another thing that one got: a printed circuit diagram of the machine.

As for today: One can get get an entire annotated disassembly for Elite, including the version that used the Second Processor: https://www.bbcelite.com

jimworm|2 years ago

Those books had tremendous impact. BBC Basic was the first programming language I ever saw, in a children's book in a library, years before I ever got to touch a PC. It made computers seem so straightforward that it felt natural to reach for one as a tool or a toy. I've only ever seen a BBC Micro in a museum.

forinti|2 years ago

Another feature that stands out on the BBC is that the underlying routines that BASIC uses for maths, IO, etc, are available via Assembly, so you could easily integrate them into your Assembly programs.

vram22|2 years ago

>- integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily

Yes, as easily as this:

some BASIC statements here

[ some assembly statements here ]

some BASIC statements here

IOW, you just had to enclose your assembly language statements in square brackets. That's it.

Of course, you would need to know what memory addresses to operate on, in a real-life program, as opposed to a demo, so that you could share data in some way between the BASIC code and the assembly code, otherwise the program might not be able to do anything useful.

I don’t know about the multi-pass assembler feature that others have mentioned in this thread.

rahimnathwani|2 years ago

On your last point: on the first pass the assembler wouldn't know about labels that came later on the assembly, but on the second pass it would have seen them. IIRC normal way to run the assembler was to do to a for loop from 0 to 3 with step size 3, as 0 indicated suppressing all assembler errors.

gadders|2 years ago

The other big difference with BBC Basic was that it had functions. The other version of Basic I used only had Subroutines accessed via Gosub.

justinlloyd|2 years ago

Not just functions, but procedures too, and local variables. DEF PROC, DEF FN, and LOCAL.

quickthrower2|2 years ago

Teletext mode (MODE 7 IIRC) was fun too!

forinti|2 years ago

Having functions and procedures also made it stand out at the time.

brainwipe|2 years ago

Additionally - the BBC would put "how to code" programmes on the TV. That's how my neighbour got started when I was knee high.