2019-11-13 15:28:16 -05:00
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# basic
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**Work in progress, not finished.**
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This is a BASIC interpreter which is being written from scratch for Collapse OS.
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There are many existing z80 implementations around, some of them open source
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and most of them good and efficient, but because a lot of that code overlaps
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with code that has already been written for zasm, I believe that it's better to
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reuse those bits of code.
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Integrating an existing BASIC to Collapse OS seemed a bigger challenge than
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writing from scratch, so here I am, writing from scratch again...
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The biggest challenge here is to extract code from zasm, adapt it to fit BASIC,
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not break anything, and have the wisdom to see when copy/pasting is a better
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idea.
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2019-11-19 15:14:04 -05:00
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## Design goal
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The reason for including a BASIC dialect in Collapse OS is to supply some form
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of system administration swiss knife. zasm, ed and the shell can do
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theoretically anything, but some tasks (which are difficult to predict) can
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possibly be overly tedious. One can think, for example, about hardware
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debugging. Poking and peeking around when not sure what we're looking for can
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be a lot more effective with the help of variables, conditions and for-loops in
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an interpreter.
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Because the goal is not to provide a foundation for complex programs, I'm
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planning on intentionally crippling this BASIC dialect for the sake of
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simplicity.
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