Re: Apple lle and BASIC

[Jonno Downes <jonnosan@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, March 27, 2011 8:09:14 AM UTC+11, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> I'm led to understand that Atari BASIC is essentially a rewrite of 
> Wozniak's BASIC.  (Shares an author with DOS 3.3, as I recall!)  It does 
> have microsoftisms though.

Atari BASIC was written by Bill Wilkinson, who doesn't show up in any of the Apple DOS references I can find.

I am not familiar with the internals of Integer BASIC, but I find Atari BASIC quite different from Microsoft flavours. Atari BASIC does syntax checking as lines are entered (what it called 'compilation'), not at run-time. It does this by using something called the "Atari BASIC meta language" (very similar to BNF). 

So a large part of the Atari BASIC source code (which I have in the form of a Compute! book called "The Atari BASIC Sourcebook") is something called the Syntax tables; the recursive definitions of the way BASIC tokens can be combined into legal statements. I have not seen any equivalent to this in any of the 8080 or 6502 MS BASICs I have poked around with.