IEEE Spectrum gives some love to BASIC

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IEEE Spectrum (the general interest magazine for IEEE members) published this article on BASIC (including some screen shots and named examples of BASIC on 8-bit micros!) this week, which I found enjoyable:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/yes-you-can-write-an-awesome-game-in-just-10-lines-of-basic

The rules and submissions/winning entries for the BASIC 10-liner contest mentioned in the article are here:

The page is in German, but an English translation appears beneath the German text.

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Excellent! I’m especially taken by this:

Cave Adventure , a bijou text adventure for the ZX81 (accomplished despite the fact that “the ZX81 allows only one command per line!” marvels Kanold);

So just 10 commands. And as it turns out, could have been just 8 if longer lines had been used.

But when it says

The barriers to participation are low. Ten lines [is] a manageable project.

I was reminded of another project: It can take two months to write one line of Basic…

Piece by piece the program was rewritten and restructured. Two months later we produced a version which would fit on one line.

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So, 2 things here - one is that the competition is now closed and the other is that you can’t actually enter that program into a BBC Micro - the reason being that the human-readable LISTed output is longer than the maximum input line length - it’s only by tokenising it and poking it into RAM (or, I suspect concatenating several tokenised lines in memory) that it’s possible to get it into the system.

… although reading some more on it, it suggests it’s using “mode 9” which is only available on the 32-bit ARM versions, so maybe they have a longer input buffer before tokenisation. Ah well.

Cheers,

-Gordon

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Closed … for this year! :slight_smile:

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Cave Adventure (ZX81) [1] is particularly nice – as it is for my personal taste most in the spirit of a 10-liner.
That said, Mini Bros [2], while quite an extensive program, is still impressive for a small BASIC game.
(And, for someone who started with Commodore BASIC, Atari BASIC is quite impressive as well!)

[1] Cave Adventure source code: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vigwx5pko1mbies/AADbBaE9PZE8n6uHUDz-GRXYa/ZX81/LISTING?preview=15CAVEADV.txt
[2] Mini Bros: 10-liner: Mini Bros

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