History?

[drogon]

Mindful of the fact the Lee is no-longer with us, I'm wondering if anyone knows some of the history of EHBasic?

Specifically if it was a project that Lee started from scratch or something else that was adapted.

I'm basically confused as to why the current source code looks like a disassembly of something else. Did Lee lose the source code at one point? Or is Lees original source gone forever and all we have is a disassembly that's been fiddled with over the years to work with..

No specific reasons, just idle curiosity, really. I have both EHBasic and BBC Basic 4 running on my little system now and I'll probably stick to BBC Basic more for familiarity than anything else, but EHBasic might be easier to hack...

Cheers,

-Gordon

[barrym95838]

Although the differences are obvious and numerous, I don't think any reasonable argument would be able to plausibly deny a "non-trivial" influence from the Microsoft versions of the late 1970s. Evidence includes (but is certainly not limited to) the general order in which the reserved tokens are defined, the nearly identical "CHRGET" uhm "LAB_GBYT" subroutines, etc. Efficient 6502 code to implement a BASIC interpreter is bound to involve some idiomatic coding patterns, but (as a 6502 coder with over 35 years of experience) I stand by my claim that the influence is undeniable.

[BigEd]

I've a feeling the log and trig functions are directly "borrowed" from MS Basic. But I haven't looked into it.
There's an article here
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=46
and a source repo here
https://github.com/mist64/msbasic
which consolidates all the flavours of MS Basic into one source tree.

[drogon]

Ok, thanks (both) for that. I've seen the published MS stuff but have really not gone through it any any sort of detail at all, but it seems like EHBasic is a Microsoft-ish BASIC with Enhancements... I can live with that.

Cheers,

-Gordon