Date   : Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:55:48 +0100
From   : jgh@... (J.G.Harston)
Subject: .basic file type, comments please...

Rick Murray wrote:
> Therefore, I nominate ".basic" to be Acorn tokenised BASIC (nominally of
> RISC OS pedigree, but that's a superset of earlier versions).

Problem is, an extension for Acorn tokenised BASIC already exists, and
has done for 29 years. Also, semantically, ".basic" would be something
similar to ".bas", ie *any* Basic.

When you start with the file on an Acorn filesystem it will be called,
for example "Gobble". On transfer to a DOS-type filesystem that becomes
"Gobble". It would only become "Gobble.basic" if it started off as
"Gobble/basic".

See See http://beebwiki.jonripley.com/Format and
http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/Acorn/Filetypes

This isn't something plucked out of the air, but the pre-exisiting
reality that has been around since about 1982.

 From day 1, a BBC BASIC file stored on an Acorn system would typically
be called "Animal".

When Richard Russell wrote Z80 BBC BASIC for CP/M in 1982, that
same program in Russell tokenised format would be stored on a CP/M
disk as "Animal.bbc". The Acorn-format "Animal" file when transfered
to a CP/M disk would appear as "Animal", but more usually, as we're
talking BBC BASIC, and it makes sense to refer to it in the manner that
BBC BASIC on CP/M would access it, "Animal." - note the "." extension.

This continued to be the case when Richard wrote the 80x86 DOS
version of BBC BASIC in 1986.

Consequently, since 1982, an Acorn-format tokenised BBC BASIC file
stored on a media that uses filename extensions (CP/M, DOS, etc)
has a filename with a "." extension, and a Russell-format tokenised
BBC BASIC file stored on a media that used filename extensions has
a filename with a ".bbc" extension.

On Acorn media, those two types of file would appear as, for example,
"Animal" and "Animal/bbc".

-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...