Date   : Fri, 16 Jun 2000 21:27:50 +0100
From   : Mike Mallett <mike.mallett@...>
Subject: BBC Basic (Z80) now free (FWD)

Might be of interest ....


From: russell.marks@...^H^H^H^Hntlworld.com (Russell Marks)
Newsgroups: comp.os.cpm, comp.sys.amstrad.8bit
Subject: BBC Basic (Z80) now free
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 11:41:43 GMT

BBC Basic (Z80) for CP/M is now freely available from:

  http://www.rtrussell.co.uk/products/products.html

(That's not a *direct* link to the Basic, but it's the one the author
would prefer announced. :-))

After I raised the issue with R. T. Russell a while back when I
noticed his website, he's now distributing his BBC Basic for CP/M for
free. (This is in the free-beer sense only, I'm afraid; I did suggest
open-sourcing it, but he wasn't keen on that as he still sells a PC
version.)

If you're wondering why this Basic should be any more interesting than
any other, the main reason is that BBC Basic was (IMHO) ahead of its
time. It's nearer to the `modern' Basics like QuickBasic than MBASIC,
in that it has procedures, functions, etc., and I'd consider it
arguably the best Basic available for CP/M. And I think it's easily
the best free one. :-)

Inevitably, there are disadvantages too. But the only significant
one I'm aware of is that it reads/writes rather odd text files from
a CP/M perspective (they're CR-delimited like on the Mac). If you're
only using the files in BBC Basic it's fine, of course - failing
that, it has binary I/O so you can kludge together CP/M-friendly
text. (It comes with example code in f-rstd.bbc and f-wstd.bbc,
showing how to take the latter approach.) Awkward perhaps, but no
more awkward than attempts at structured programming in MBASIC. ;-)
Also, keywords must be entered in all-caps (as on the BBC). This can
be a pain if you're not used to it, but enabling Caps Lock and
forgetting about it works...

There's also documentation available, in a manner of speaking; it's
actually for the aforementioned PC version, but much of it applies
equally to the CP/M one. That's here:

  http://www.rtrussell.co.uk/products/bbcbasic/manual/index.html

I believe other Z80 variants *may* also be free now, but the CP/M
version is the only one currently available from RTR's site itself.
I'm still talking with RTR about the status of other Z80 versions. In
particular I'm hoping that, together with the Amstrad and Arnor
consent I remember seeing on csa8, I may finally be able to distribute
*most* of the NC100 ROM with nc100em. (I'd still have to chop out the
spellchecker, but that'd be no great loss IMHO and I may be able to
put some dummy code in to stop the WP crashing if you do a
spellcheck.)

-Rus.