Path: csiph.com!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Marcos Cruz Newsgroups: alt.lang.basic,comp.lang.basic.misc Subject: Re: [ANN] tbas, the new BASIC interpreter for UNIX, is out Followup-To: comp.lang.basic.misc Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 07:27:34 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 45 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: cVbnYUa/+4N+stIHxnay+A.user.gioia.aioe.org X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: slrn/pre1.0.0-18 (Linux) X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com alt.lang.basic:731 comp.lang.basic.misc:441 ["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.basic.misc.] En/Je/On 2017-09-23, Antonio Maschio 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!