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by iainmerrick 890 days ago
Yeah, BBC BASIC is really good. Both the language design and the implementation.

I loved it at the time, and the more I think back on it the more impressed I am. Like it had a very decent suite of floating-point routines, which if I remember right were very performant. In a 32KB ROM!

2 comments

Some of the improvement in BBC BASIC over Microsoft's BASIC is attributable to the larger ROM(the first Altair BASIC was just 4k), but it's also that the BBC Micro's 6502 and DRAM was clocked higher than contemporaries. It's just a faster, more refined 8-bit machine all around.
Basic was actually a 16KB ROM. MOS occupied another 16KB ROM.
Dang, you're right, I was misremembering.