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Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out

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En/Je/On 2017-09-23, Antonio Maschio <ing.antonio.maschio@gmail.com>
escribi'o/skribis/wrote:

> Antonio and Ian are proud to tell you all that tbas is out in its Alpha 
> version.

> tbas is a lightweight console interpreter, that can deal with a lot of 
> BASIC statements, structured programming and modern features.
>
> tbas is free, with sources and documentation. It needs only gcc to be 
> compiled, and a Linux/UNIX machine to properly run.

My first impressions:

tbas compiled like a charm on Raspbian. The documentation is excellent.
And even a Vim syntax file is included!

The language provides modern `do loop` structures, a versatile `sub` and
many other useful features.

I've searched the manual for `locate` and `merge`, but it seems they are
still missing from this alpha version, right?

The `man` page seems to suggest the input file is optional, since it is
showed in brackets, but it's mandatory.  Will a future version of tbas
provide a command line interface?

It's the first time I see patterns of `using` based on a numbered line,
marked with `:` or `image`. It looks an unusual syntax, but may be it's
useful to make the code more legible in some cases. By the way, I always
wondered why the classic BASIC's `using` is just a modifier of `print`
instead of an independent function, say `using$()`, which would be more
versatile.

Finally, the non-standard special characters "&" (suspend loading) and
"@" (stop loading) seem useful to include source documentation, but why
two of them? I mean, maybe "&" could suspend loading not only until the
next "&", but also until the end of file -- whatever comes first, thus
making "@" almost unnecessary.

I'll try tbas further and I'll follow its development.

Congratulations to the tbas team!

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Thread

[ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Antonio Maschio <ing.antonio.maschio@gmail.com> - 2017-09-23 09:23 +0200
  Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Bruce Axtens <snetxa@hotmail.com> - 2017-10-09 14:51 +0800
  Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Marcos Cruz <use_the_contact_page@programandala.net> - 2017-10-19 07:27 +0000
    Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Antonio Maschio <ing.antonio.maschio@gmail.com> - 2018-04-29 08:57 +0200
      Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Antonio Maschio <ing.antonio.maschio@gmail.com> - 2018-04-29 09:01 +0200
      Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Marcos Cruz <use_the_contact_page@programandala.net> - 2018-05-31 20:18 +0000

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