True BASIC

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True BASIC is a variant of the

History

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True BASIC traces its history to an offshoot of

By the early 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running some variation of Microsoft BASIC, which had become the de facto standard. The ANSI efforts eventually became pointless, as it became clear that these versions were not going to have any market impact in a world dominated by Microsoft. Both versions were eventually ratified but saw little or no adoption and the standards were later withdrawn. Kemeny and Kurtz, however, decided to continue their efforts to introduce the concepts from SBASIC and the ANSI Standard BASIC efforts. This became True BASIC.

Initially based on Dartmouth BASIC 7, True BASIC was introduced in 1985. There are versions of the True BASIC

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Being a

True BASIC provides statements for

The designers wanted to make the language hardware-independent, so True BASIC source code would run equally well on any version of their compiler.^{[citation needed]} For the most part, they succeed in this endeavor. The drawback for users was that direct access to some features of their machines was not available, but this could be remedied with callable functions and subroutines specially written in assembly language.

Using newer versions of True BASIC, some of the older functions are blocked out. An example of the recent code would be more like this:

RANDOMIZE
SET WINDOW 0,20,0,20
SET COLOR 5 !Set the pen and text colour to 5 as true basic has 0-15 colours
PRINT "Welcome To ..." !Print "Welcome To ..." on the user's screen.
 
DO !Begin the loop
    LET x=rnd*20 !Let the value 'x' equal a random number between '0' and '20'
    LET y=rnd*20 !Let the value 'y' equal a random number between '0' and '20'
    Pause .1 !Waits 1/10 of a second
    PLOT TEXT, at x, y: "Fabulous Wikipedia!" !Plot 'Fabulous Wikipedia!' at coordinates 'x' and 'y'
LOOP !End the loop
 
END !End the program

This simple program plots the text "Welcome To ..." at the top left-hand corner of the screen, and then continues into a never-ending loop plotting "Fabulous Wikipedia!" at random coordinates.

An example of simple animation could be like this:

!Draw the Car
SET WINDOW 0,20,0,20
SET COLOR 5
BOX AREA 2,6,2,3
BOX AREA 9,13,2,3
BOX AREA 16,20,2,3
SET COLOR 249
PLOT LINES :0,5;20,5
FLOOD 10,1
BOX KEEP 0,20,0,5 IN road$
BOX CIRCLE 2,3,5,6
FLOOD 2.5,5.5
BOX CIRCLE 5,6,5,6
FLOOD 5.5,5.5
SET COLOR 35
PLOT LINES :2.5,6;5.5,6
PLOT LINES :5,6;8,6;8,8;6,8;6,10;2,10;2,8;0,8;0,6;3,6
FLOOD 4,8
SET COLOR 248
BOX AREA 4,5,8,9
 
BOX KEEP 0,8,5,10 IN car$ !Save the car in 'car$'
  
FOR x=1 TO 20 STEP 1 !Create a 'for' loop
    BOX SHOW road$ AT 0,0
    BOX SHOW car$ AT x,5  
    PAUSE .1
    CLEAR
NEXT x !End the 'for' loop
 
END !End the programs

Jerry Pournelle in 1985 asked, "why do we need True BASIC at all? [It] doesn't seem to do anything regular BASIC doesn't do, and what it does do isn't attacked in a logical or intuitive manner." He criticized the lack of output when encountering an error, preventing interactive debugging by "inserting print statements as diagnostics". Pournelle concluded, "I think I'll pass up the opportunity to become a born-again True BASIC believer. I'll enjoy my Microsoft and CBASIC heresies."^[2]

Some users have complained about their programs and the editor using up 100% of their

• Kemeny, John G.; Kurtz, Thomas E. (1985). Back To BASIC: The History, Corruption, and Future of the Language. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 141 pp. 
  ISBN 0-201-13433-0
  .

• Official website