magnusfalkirk wrote:
Greetings, I was looking through the stuff I downloaded from the Asimov archive and noticed a copy of ZBasic among the stuff in the unsorted folder. I booted the disk image in an emulator on my Mac and discovered it's the Prodos version, for 128k machines and the version for 64k machines. I was thinking about transferring it to a real disk using ADTPro, but I had one question before I waste a disk. Has anyone ever used this to write a program for the Apple II and if so what do you think of it. I've also got all the documentation for it.
It is a very robust BASIC which can serve for useful development. For an example, see the program ATREE. It was written in 128k ZBasic. IIRC, there is a block utility which was also written in it. Years ago, I talked to the gent at On-Going Ideas who claimed he had developed his Forth and Pascal learning tools with ZBasic as well. I found the 128k version to be an excellent example of what can be done on a 128k machine.
I like the graphic support plus it supports block style fonts including MouseText in Hires and DHires screens. It is even possible for inverse MouseText in graphics. It doesn't support Applesoft style shape tables but I think this could be fixed with a little assembly.
Some drawbacks, large runtime code support. Somewhat limited memory space available, especially in the 64k version. There are some tricks to recover some ram and chaining programs can help. For example, in Atree I load the variables and a table for filetype info then chain into the main code. This reused the code space required for assigning text strings and variables. One can control the size of some data which can affect both code size and speed.
Also, there is a bug in the full screen editor which can cause some text loss. I've forgotten exactly what as I haven't run it in some years. I do recall using the keys to jump to the bottom of the file then back seemed to help but what a pain. There is a built in array for text but I found it somewhat slow.
Cheers, Mike T.