Andrew Kesterson
c8b917d205
No behaviour change, by decision. `A# * 0.45` is 0 and `0.45 * A#` is 1.35, because every operator branches on `self->valuetype` and converts the right operand to match. It is inherited from the Go reference, a C128 promotes to float instead, and this interpreter is at least consistent about it -- so a dialect saying the left operand wins is a defensible position, and changing it to promotion would alter the result of every mixed expression in every existing program. **The defect was that nobody said so.** Chapter 3's "Numbers" did not mention it, Chapter 13 did not list it among the differences, and nothing fails when a program gets it wrong -- it computes something else and carries on. The game in examples/ lost its per-level speed increase to `5.6 + LEVEL# * 0.45` evaluating to a flat 5.6, and bled velocity out of every bounce through `0 - BLVX%(B#)` quantising to whole pixels. Both read correctly. Neither produced a diagnostic. Now said in three places: a section in Chapter 3 with the demonstration and the two rules that keep a program out of it (put the float on the left, put the answer somewhere with a `%` on it), a row in Chapter 13 naming it as the difference from 7.0 most likely to turn a working listing into a quietly wrong one, and the reasoning on value.h where the operators are declared. tests/value_arithmetic.c pins it in both directions across multiply and subtract, with a comment saying it is the documented contract rather than an accident -- so promotion becomes a decision somebody takes deliberately rather than a change that could slip in under a passing suite. TODO.md section 9 item 4, struck as a documentation outcome. 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 17 and 18 are tutorials rather than reference: they build one complete game twice, two different ways, and are where the rules that a real program runs into are collected.
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 |
| 16. Structures | TYPE, records, strict pointers, and sharing a C struct with an embedding host |
| 17. Tutorial: Breakout | Build a whole game out of the text grid and two DATA sprites, a step at a time |
| 18. Tutorial: Breakout with artwork | Build it again out of loaded artwork, powerups and a drawn HUD |
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.