Tag: BASIC
-
Coming soon: RISCYFORTH
When I was much younger FORTH fascinated me as an alternative interpreted language for the Z80 eight-bit processor machines I was typically using. Compared to BASIC – the language that the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum came with – FORTH was reputedly lightening fast and very powerful. My brother and I even obtained a tape […]
-
Still pondering over BASIC
Last month I put a bit of effort into fixing BINSIC – the collection of Groovy scripts that allows the execution of Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC programs – and I have been thinking about the thing that they offer that modern computers don’t: the ability to switch on and just write a simple program to solve […]
-
BINSIC – Sinclair BASIC emulator – is back
BINSIC was my 2012 project to emulate Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC on a modern computer. It is a series of Groovy classes that provide a mixture of interpretation and ‘domain specific language’ (i.e. executing BASIC as native Groovy). Over the years bitrot seems to have set in and the code in the GitHub repo wouldn’t work […]
-
If only I had the time…
I would reimplement BINSIC using a JIT compiler as outlined in this rather good blog from Josh Haberman. (And, at least now I have bumped Chomsky from the top of my blog.)
-
Learnt this week… 24 January
My friend and former colleague Adam Higgitt every Friday posts a list of “five things I have learned this week”. It’s popular and good fun – especially as Adam is not afraid of an argument if you challenge some of his claims. For a while I tried to do the same thing myself, but failed […]
-
A little plug for BINSIC
Thirty-three years ago my brother and I got a new cassette player for Christmas. That allowed us to write and save games for our ZX80 computer (like many ZX80 owners we found that an older cassette player just didn’t work) and in 1981 I wrote a Z80 machine code version of Conway’s Game of Life […]
-
BAYSICK talk in Edinburgh
If you are interested in domain specific languages and in Edinburgh next week then maybe you should go along to the talk being hosted by Edlamba on Tuesday by Szymon Jachim, the author of “BAYSICK” a Scala-based DSL implementation of BASIC.
-
Tiny BASIC for the Raspberry Pi
A complete Tiny BASIC environment has been ported to the Raspberry Pi. Only slightly miffed that no one seems to have noticed that I was running BASIC on this platform more than three months ago 🙂
-
Getting booted from Wikipedia
A short article on “Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code” (BINSIC), my BASIC-like interpreter/DSL for Groovy faces getting deleted from Wikipedia on the grounds of lack-of-notability. It would not be right or proper for me to intervene to stop this, but if you have been a BINSIC user then a proper third-party reference to it […]
-
More than a game: the Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life has long fascinated me. Thirty years ago I wrote some Z80 machine code to run it on a Sinclair ZX80 and when I wrote BINSIC, my reimplentation of Sinclair ZX81 BASIC, Life was the obvious choice for a demonstration piece of BASIC (and I had to rewrite it from scratch when […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 