S-BASIC

Article summary

S-BASIC (for Structured Basic) was a "structured" BASIC variant, distributed with Kaypro CP/M systems. It was made by Topaz Programming is distributed by Micro-Ap (San Ramon, California). SBasic was compatible with the syntax of BASIC, a programming language commonly used in the 1970s through the 1980s, as well as Fortran77. However, the language relaxed many of the requirements of BASIC and had more flexibility than Fortran. For instance, line numbers were optional, and permitted non-numeric characters. In addition, SBasic offered developers structured programming concepts, including recursion and nesting. Many PL/I programs could be compiled with little modification, though SBasic did not offer an extensive function library. Among the more advanced features was the ability to "base" a variable or array, making the memory location dynamic and modifiable during execution. SBasic programs had the ability to access memory areas reserved for the operating system unless prohibited from doing so by the operating system itself. (Kaypro's CP/M had no such prohibitions.) This enabled direct utilization and modification of DMA and other memory areas. This feature also permitted a program to modify itself at run-time. This capability also allowed modifying the instruction pointer, so a program could effectively link other executable modules that were read during execution as data.…

Key claims

No claims recorded.

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.