Andrew Kesterson
16b38c1138
Chapters 6 and 8 described what a verb draws in prose. Eight figures now show it, and each one is produced by running the BASIC listing printed immediately above it -- so a picture cannot drift away from the code beside it, which is the way a screenshot goes wrong and the way nothing notices. tools/screenshot.c is a second SDL host, much smaller than the frontend: dummy video driver, software renderer, run to completion, read the target back, write a PNG. It draws no text layer on purpose, so a READY in the corner is not noise in a figure about BOX and no font has to be resolved. tools/docs_screenshots.sh reads the new screenshot=NAME fence tag straight out of the markdown. size=WxH is the second tag, and SCALE's figure uses it: the point being made is a 320x200 listing filling a larger window, which cannot be made on a 320x200 surface. Two gates, answering different questions. docs_examples fails a tagged block with no image, in both configurations, so a figure cannot be added and forgotten. docs_screenshots -- a CTest, AKGL build only -- re-renders every figure and compares byte for byte, so a listing edited without regenerating fails. Only the second catches a stale picture. The PNGs are checked in because a reader on the forge has no build tree, and docs/images/README.md says loudly that they are generated. Regenerating is never part of a build: the target is run deliberately, so a make cannot put eight binary diffs in front of whoever ran it. Drawing the BOX figure caught a defect in TODO.md itself. Deviation 16 claimed in bold that BOX fills on a negative angle while its own paragraph said the fill was filed rather than implemented. BOX cannot fill, and filled_rect is reached by no verb as a result. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The akbasic guide
akbasic is a BASIC interpreter in the style of Commodore BASIC 7.0 — the dialect the C128 shipped with — and Dartmouth BASIC. It runs programs from a file or from an interactive prompt, and it is also a C library you can link into a game so that players can script it.
These chapters follow the shape of the C128 Programmer's Reference Guide: the language first, then each hardware area, then the reference sections. If you know BASIC 7.0 you can skip to Chapter 13, which is the list of everything that behaves differently here and why. Chapter 14 is the odd one out: it is about the interpreter rather than the language, for anyone embedding it, debugging it or changing it.
Chapters
| 1. Introduction | What akbasic is, what it is not, and how to build it |
| 2. Getting started | The prompt, your first program, saving and loading |
| 3. The language | Variables, types, arrays, operators, expressions |
| 4. Control flow | IF, FOR, DO, GOSUB, labels, ON, error trapping |
| 5. Strings and formatting | String functions, PRINT USING, PUDEF |
| 6. Graphics | GRAPHIC, DRAW, BOX, CIRCLE, PAINT, shapes |
| 7. Sound | SOUND, PLAY, ENVELOPE, VOL, TEMPO |
| 8. Sprites | SPRITE, SPRSAV, MOVSPR, collision |
| 9. Files and disk | Channels, DOPEN, program storage |
| 10. Embedding | Driving the interpreter from C |
| 11. Verb reference | Every statement, alphabetically |
| 12. Function reference | Every function, alphabetically |
| 13. Differences from BASIC 7.0 | What a C128 programmer needs to know |
| 14. Architecture | How the interpreter is put together, how to debug it, how to change it |
| 15. Error codes | Appendix: every value ER# can hold and every error line the interpreter prints |
The shortest possible start
$ cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build
$ ./build/basic
10 FOR I# = 1 TO 5
20 PRINT "HELLO " + I#
30 NEXT I#
RUN
HELLO 1
HELLO 2
HELLO 3
HELLO 4
HELLO 5
READY
Two things in that program are not Commodore BASIC and will catch you out
immediately: variables carry a type suffix (I# is an integer) and +
concatenates a string with a number. Chapter 3 explains both.
Every example in these chapters is executed by the test suite and its output
compared byte for byte — see MAINTENANCE.md if you are editing them.