How are Classic BASIC programs executed?

Modified on Wed, 15 Apr at 7:50 PM

For Classic BASIC, we use the Dartmouth BASIC dialect of BASIC. It's manual is available online at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/dtss/196801_BASIC_4th_Edition.pdf.

Classic BASIC programs are executed by running:

bwbasic -p /opt/bwbasic/dartmouth.profile -s {mainfile}

The dartmouth.profile file consists of the single line:

option version "dartmouth"

Classic BASIC provides no way to determine end-of-file on input. However, an unexpected EOF encountered by an INPUT instruction will cause the program to exit, but will not generate a non-zero exit code. It is therefore possible to write a program that processes an indeterminate number of input values simply by using INPUT in an infinite loop. Problems that require processing after end-of-file, however, cannot be solved.

Processing of alphanumeric data requires use of the CONVERT instruction. See the manual for details.