akbasic/docs/13-differences.md

13. Differences from BASIC 7.0

If you already write Commodore BASIC, this is the chapter to read first. Everything here is deliberate, and everything is recorded in the repository's TODO.md with the reasoning — this is the short version.

The language

Variables carry a type suffix, and the suffixes differ

	Integer	Float	String
C128	A%	A	A$
akbasic	A#	A%	A$

There is no such thing as an unsuffixed variable. A bare name is a label.

= works in a condition, and == works everywhere

IF A = 5 THEN does what you expect. == also means equality and is what the older programs in this repository use. Outside a condition = is assignment, as always.

AND, OR and NOT in conditions

These work, and a condition is a whole expression rather than a single comparison, so IF A = 1 AND B = 2 THEN parses. Truth is nonzero, so IF A THEN works too.

MID and INSTR count from zero

A C128 counts from one. A failed INSTR gives -1 rather than 0.

THEN needs a verb

IF X THEN 100 is not a jump. Write IF X THEN GOTO 100.

Strings are 255 characters and cannot contain a quote

There is no escape character.

Numbers

Integers are 64-bit and floats are IEEE doubles, so PRINT 1.5 gives 1.500000. A leading zero is not octal; 0x is hexadecimal.

Mixed arithmetic follows the left operand, not the wider type

A C128 promotes to float. This does not. An integer on the left converts the right operand to an integer and throws its fraction away, so A# * 0.45 is 0 where 0.45 * A# is 1.35. It is consistent, it is inherited from the Go interpreter this was ported from, and nothing fails when you get it wrong — the program computes something else and carries on.

Chapter 3 has the two rules that keep you out of it. This is the difference from 7.0 most likely to turn a working listing into a quietly wrong one.

Structures are an addition

BASIC 7.0 has no records at all. TYPE/END TYPE, DIM X@ AS T, the @ suffix, . and ->, PTR TO and POINT ... AT are all new here, and Chapter 16 is the whole of it. Nothing about it changes an existing program.

Two consequences a C128 programmer should know. A structure assignment copies, like every other assignment; sharing is spelled POINT. And a type name is a bare word, so it shares a namespace with verbs and labels — TYPE POINT is refused because POINT is now a verb.

Block structure

A whole loop on one line does not loop.

10 FOR I# = 1 TO 3 : PRINT I# : NEXT I#
20 PRINT "DONE"

DONE

The loop prints nothing. Block skipping walks source lines, so a NEXT on the same line as its FOR is never reached. The same applies to DO/LOOP. Write loops across lines.

Two known defects in FOR

Both are recorded, both have tests asserting the correct behaviour, and both are waiting on a decision rather than on work:

• A step that overshoots runs the body one extra time. FOR I = 1 TO 9 STEP 3 runs with 1, 4, 7 and 10.
• FOR I = 1 TO 1 does not run its body at all, where every other BASIC runs it once.

The two errors cancel out for a step of 1, which is why they went unnoticed. Fixing them would change the output of a checked-in acceptance file, which is not something this project does silently.

A loop counter does not survive its loop. It lives in the loop's own scope, so reading it afterwards gives zero.

Direct mode

A statement typed with no line number runs immediately, as it should. This was not true until recently — the interpreter used to file everything but a handful of verbs as program text.

Line numbers

A program in a file does not need them. Every BASIC this dialect descends from required a number on every line; here that requirement belongs to the prompt alone, where the number is the only thing separating program text from a statement to run now. A program loaded from a file, or handed to the library as a string, may leave them out, and a line without one is given the next number going. The two mix: a numbered line sets where the next unnumbered one goes.

This is QuickBASIC's idea rather than the C128's, and it is here for the same reason QuickBASIC had it — a program that branches by LABEL never names a line number, so the numbers are maintenance with nothing on the other end of it.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• GOTO <number> must name a number the program wrote. In a file with no line numbers GOTO 100 would otherwise find the hundredth line and branch there. It is refused before the program runs. GOTO <label> is unaffected.
• LIST and DSAVE show the numbers that were handed out, one apart. RENUMBER before DSAVE if you want gaps to insert into.

An unnumbered program is capped at 9998 lines, which is the cap that already applied.

Errors

ER and EL are ER# and EL#, ordinary global variables. ER# holds this interpreter's error code, which bears no relation to a Commodore error number. Print ERR(ER#) for the text, and see Chapter 15 for the whole list.

Graphics

• A coordinate is a window pixel, not one of 320 by 200. A C128 listing therefore draws in the top-left corner of a larger window; SCALE 1, 319, 199 gives it the whole window back. RGR(1) and RGR(2) report the size, and are ours rather than 7.0's — where 7.0's RGR takes only field 0, the GRAPHIC mode.
• SSHAPE puts a handle in the string, not the pixels. You can pass it to GSHAPE and SPRSAV; you cannot save it or take its LEN.
• WIDTH is emulated by drawing parallel passes.
• Drawing does not persist across frames. The verbs draw straight to the renderer, so anything drawn is overwritten on the next frame unless the program redraws it. This is a defect, not a design.
• And a redraw has to fit. The host runs a fixed number of source lines and then presents the frame, and presenting discards the drawing buffer — so a sequence of drawing verbs longer than one batch comes back half drawn, with an SSHAPE at the end capturing only what was issued since the present. "Redraw it every frame" is therefore not sufficient advice on its own. Measured against the standalone frontend's 256 lines a batch: after synchronising to a jiffy edge, 220 lines of drawing survive a capture and 250 do not. The only way a program can see the boundary is to watch TI#, which is refreshed once per batch — so the step on which it changes is the first step of one. Chapter 18 builds a pacing routine out of exactly that.
• CHAR ignores its colour argument and needs a text device with a cursor.

Sound

• PLAY and SOUND do not block. The statement after them runs immediately.
• FILTER is refused. There is no filter stage to configure.
• PLAY's M is accepted and does nothing.
• TEMPO's calibration is a choice, not a transcription.

Sprites

• Coordinates are window pixels, not the VIC-II's raster space, and SCALE does not apply to them.
• SPRSAV takes an integer array, not a string, for the data form — a string here cannot hold a zero byte. It also takes an image file path, which a C128 cannot.
• A sprite loaded from a file keeps the image's own size, not 24 by 21.
• MOVSPR's speed unit is a choice. The manual does not say what a unit is worth.
• Collision is by bounding box, not by pixel, and only type 1 exists.
• Priority and multicolour are recorded but not drawn.
• SPRDEF is out of scope.

Files

• PRINT # and INPUT # need a space before the #. PRINT#1 scans as a variable name.
• RECORD counts lines, not fixed-length records.
• BLOAD requires a length.
• HEADER, COLLECT, BACKUP and BOOT are refused. They operate on a physical disk.
• DIRECTORY is refused pending a wrapper in the standard library.

Machine

• SYS is refused. There is no 6502 and no ROM.
• FETCH and STASH are the same byte copy. There is no expansion RAM to tell them apart.
• POKE, PEEK and POINTER use real process addresses. A wrong one is a segmentation fault, not an error message.
• BANK, FAST and MONITOR do not exist.

Formatting

• PRINT USING renders one field per statement. PRINT USING "### ###"; A, B is not supported.
• Exponential fields (^^^^) are not implemented.

Console

• SLEEP and WAIT hold the program without blocking the host. SLEEP with no host clock does nothing at all rather than waiting forever.
• TI and TI$ are TI# and TI$, refreshed once per step.
• WAIT polls ordinary process memory. Nothing changes it but the host.
• KEY stores macros and nothing expands them.

Limits

Source lines	9999
Line length	255
String length	255
Variables	128
Array elements	1024 per array, 4096 across every array and structure
Scopes	32
Labels	64
DATA items	512
File channels	10
Operations per line	roughly 16

Every one is a fixed pool. Nothing in the interpreter calls malloc, which is what makes it safe to embed in a game that cannot afford a surprise allocation.

A scalar does not come out of the 4096. It lives in the variable itself, so creating one inside a GOSUB or a FOR — including the loop counter — costs nothing and can be done for as long as the program runs. An array declared inside a scope does come out of it and is not given back: the pool never frees, which is what lets a pointer into a record outlive the scope that declared it. In practice that means DIM at the top rather than in a loop, which is where you would have put it anyway.