Re: BASIC

Payton Byrd schrieb:
What BASIC languages are available for the Atari 8-bit systems? I've been doing some benchmarking and am stunned with how poorly the BASIC in the XL ROM performs given the relatively high 1.79 mhz CPU clock.


From what I remember:

There is of course Atari Basic (rev. A to C). The main source of its
slowness is the floating-point math.

Then we have TurboBasic, which is a lot faster because it replaces the
math pack by its own routines. It is backwards compatible to the Atari
basic.

There is also Microsoft basic available for the 8bits. I do not have a
clear picture about its speed, though. It is quite different and not
compatible to Atari Basic whatsoever.

Then we have BasicXL from OSS which was also IIRC backwards compatible
with Atari Basic, but not faster, only richer.

Finally, if speed is your issue, then I would also suggest to look into
compilers. For Atari Basic, a purely integer based compiler is the "ABC"
which has also been widely used by professional software (Micropose did
use it a lot) and the Turbo Basic compiler. There are a couple of
others, but I never tried them.

So long,
Thomas
.