Online Documentation
These pages contain articles, tutorials and other documentation in HTML format. A concise but complete TinyBASIC manual is included in the TinyBASIC package. The extra information here supplements that.
Tiny BASIC Manual
This is the manual that comes with the Tiny BASIC package. It's complete but concise, as a Unix man page should be. Other documents in this section will expand upon the concepts here. NAME tinybasic - Tiny BASIC interpreter and compiler SYNOPSIS tinybasic [ options ] program-file DESCRIPTION Tinybasic is an implementation of the Tiny BASIC language. It conforms to the specification by Dennis Allison, published in People’s Computer Company Vol.4 No.2 and ... (read more...)
Tiny BASIC History
Tiny BASIC has an interesting decades-old history and is a precursor to the modern Free Software movement. The Beginnings of BASIC The original BASIC language was developed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, on on a cut-price minicomputer at Dartmouth College, USA. It was intended to be easy enough to learn for students of all disciplines, not just computing, so that those moving on to a variety of careers got a taste of what computers ... (read more...)
Tiny BASIC Tutorial
This is a very simplistic tutorial on how to write programs in Tiny BASIC. It's aimed at people who have done little or no programming in the past. It's split into sections, summarised in the links below. After the introduction, each section takes a command or two and explains what they do and how to use them. Before you get started, you will want to download a copy of Tiny BASIC from the Compiler Downloads page. You will ... (read more...)
The Sample Games
There are six example programs supplied with the Tiny BASIC Interpreter and Compiler. They are all modern implementations of classic games from the 1960s and 1970s. All of them are simple scrolling text games played by entering numbers, and were chosen because they suit the limitations of Tiny BASIC. The pages in this section describe how to play each one, and what you can learn from the program code. You can get them by downloading Tiny BASIC itself, from ... (read more...)
Adapting to Tiny BASIC for BASIC Programmers
You may be old enough to remember the 1980s home computer boom. Your computer booted directly into BASIC, and that's what you learned to program with. That BASIC would have features like string handling and arrays. It would have a FOR loop structure for counting. And if you were very lucky, it might even have a DO or WHILE loop structure. Tiny BASIC has none of these things. But this article shows how you might simulate some of ... (read more...)
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