Interesting. Will it run normal basic/68k programs, or not?

Also...TI seemed to have a fit when asked about Michael V's OS that he was working on for the 83+. Would they have or have they had a fit about this? If not, what's different?

well, i know it will run asm... i tried with aspirin. i dont kno about basic, as that was all part of TI's OS, and not directly of the processor. thus, i think that normal TI BASIC progs wont be able to be run, at least not at first.

1. Aspirin?

2. This may spur development of a TI-BASIC compiler

aspirin is a good game for the 89 (ASM)

Is there a well defined grammar for Ti-Basic? It should be relatively simple to make a compiler... The basic programming features (loops, conditional statements, variables) are very easy to deal with--and the TI-specific calls could just be mapped to the rom?

There's a few problems with TI-Basic that really make it a pain. I don't know the 89basic, but on Z80 you can do this:

While 1
...
Goto A
...
End
Label A
...Dostuff....
End <--- This will jump back to the While Statement

Basically, it looks like statements that require End's are pushed on the stack, and every time an End is encountered they are popped off.
This is very different than with C for example, you couldn't write a Basic2C translator.

And if you want to support _all_ of basic you need to bundle the compiler with the runtime:
(can't remember the syntax, but):

InputString S
toEquation S, y1
y1

This evaluates arbitrary CAS strings

With 89 BASIC, there are definite blocks of code-not like in Z80 BASIC.

In Morvlon 3.00, there is a compiler for a new language, MCL, that is surprisingly similar to TI-BASIC.

Here I present my conveniently timed alternative :)!

Please!Please!Please! state below your perceived deficiencies in PedroM and everyone who cares about OS or shell development (including me) will take note for PedroM's future competitors. Spur the free market, encourage the development of software, contribute to the advancement of information technology, and, best of all, complain freely!

They will have a fit++, even if it includes no TI code. Ugh. I don't even want to consider what will happen.

TI-BASIC doesn't run. There is no TI-BASIC interpreter yet. Assembly/C programs using any symbolic mathematics won't work either, because there is no CAS. Most TSRs won't work either. And some other ROM_CALLs are also missing. But some assembly/C programs do run (my backgammon game for example :-) ).

If I were really pressed to do it (and begged, pleaded, etc.) I could probably write a BASIC detokenizer, at the very least... MAYBE an interpreter...

please note that I don't promise that I would finish it.

Oh, Michael, Please, please, please, won't you find it in your heart to do it for us all?

-That was my effort, from W-

yes, please do... for all those BASIC losers out there, assist us by making a BASIC interpreter/compiler.

*twitch*
you want a compiler? hmm.
well, next YEAR in college I'll be taking a Compilers class... that could help. but if you just want an interpreter, I could probably swing that.

What do you mean by "BASIC _losers_", huh? BASIC is an excellent programming language!

What are you smking?

At least it is not good for a gme other than a menu based text adventure.

-W-

Uhh...

Grayscale is easy in BASIC, pictures are loaded quickly, etc.

Only if you use flib. In pur BASIC it is impossible to do it flickerless.

I didn't say flickerless...:)

Actually, that's not quite true. You won't be able to do complex animation or anything, but if you store up to four gray planes of a single image, you can use the CyclePic command with a delay of zero to imitate grayscale. It's as close to flickerless as you can get in BASIC, and with only two planes it IS flickerless. I exploited this in a program I wrote that let you make/view grayscale images (really sets of four images) on the TI-89.

Hey, I did exactly that to view a 4- and later an 8-level grayscale Mandelbrot's set fractal I generated with a BASIC program I wrote. The 4-level picture I think had an occasional flicker, and the 8-level picture had more noticeable flicker.

Hooray! I'm not the only one that comes up with good ideas anymore! ;D

One HW1 Cycle pic is notably flickery for a full screen 2 full screen pics. For HW2 on my V200, it flipped the pics so fast, that you could see when the screen was being refreshed.

"pure".
"without flickering."
(flickerless is close enough to not being a word. flickerlessly is not a word.)

Up geshut

But pretty good for writing a non-trivial symbolic manipulation program.

But not the only way. :-) See Gosper89 at my web page linked above.

PS: I know _you_ know about it, but the people you were replying to probably don't.

I know :) I just meant that it's easy to get an algorithm implemented, compared to other methods (C, HP RPL, etc.) And it often works fine (besides the slow dynamic loops, which I try to avoid).

It really is a huge project.
I tried to write a Basic2C translator for the TI83/5 in 1998, and failed, as I couln't finish the CAS parser, didn't have a clue about compilers.
(I wanted to pay off my hours and hours of Basic programming by automatically porting my programs to the PC.)
See my above posts about major problems with this.

Looked again in 2001, got some new ideas, but there are really a lot of details to worry about, and emulating exact behaviour is really hard.

Now that I know something about compilers, I promised myself I would finish this project someday. This summer, maybe?

Another cool use for this would be to write a Java applet that would allow ticalc.org visitors to demo BASIC programs on-site before downloading them.