• DOI:10.1145/988216.988221
• Corpus ID: 31236801

The new ANSI BASIC standard

@article{Guntheroth1983TheNA,
  title={The new ANSI BASIC standard},
  author={Kurt Guntheroth},
  journal={ACM SIGPLAN Notices},
  year={1983},
  volume={18},
  pages={50-59}
}

• K. Guntheroth
• Published 1 July 1983
• Computer Science
• ACM SIGPLAN Notices

There is an effort under way at ANSI to provide a new standard for the BASI C language. This standard supplements an inadequate standard [ANSI 78] adopted i n 1979 for 'minimal BASIC'. The standard was undertaken in an effort to provid e more interchangeability among BASIC programs. So far, the committee has proceeded quietly, with only a brief article in BYT E [Kurtz 82] to announce the existence of the standard and Open the public discussion phase of the adoption process. As part of that discussion here is a critique of selected features of the proposed new ANSI BASIC, which I feel may be ill-considered. The ANSI BASIC standard is an attempt to provide a description of a standar d BASIC implementation which will allow interchangeability among BASIC program s written on diverse hardware. A broad group of industry, educational, and business professionals contributed to this standard. The standard is comprehensive. There is a core specification common to al l implementations and several standard extensions covering specialized areas lik e multitasking, file formats, graphics, and editing. Great care was taken to unambiguously specify the points which are the mos t confusing (and most variable among current implementations). Standards fo r editing, error handling, and documentation of implementation-defined feature s were set forth. The standard is well organized and written, and is relativel y readable. A unique feature of the standard is that certain portions are optional. Fo r instance, the standard provides facilities for real-time process control, but a n implementation need not provide them if it is not designed for real-time applications . This is a welcome change from standards which force all implementations to include every feature envisioned by the standard committee. Another feature of the standard is that it specifies two levels of conformance. (1) An implementation of BASIC conforms to the standard if it includes the ful l core standard, plus all features of any optional components that are implemented .