gobasic

I made a simple BASIC interpreter in golang, and one of the sample programs allows you to enter BASIC into a browser and see a PNG of the output. I called that "visual basic" even though it is nowhere near the same thing! https://github.com/skx/gobasic I had way more fun than I expected tinkering with it though, made me very nostalgic for the ZX Spectrum which was my first computer.

I had fun writing my own BASIC - less advanced, as I had no graphics, but also designed to be embedded in golang applications. I accept that 99% of the software I publish will have zero users, so even if it's no good for others it is still rewarding for its own sake. As for why? Nostalgia. The first computer I owned was a ZX Spectrum that booted to BASIC. I loved it. I still love writing in BASIC, and I still play spectrum games under emulation at least once every few months. My BASIC is like this one, fun to write, fun to tinker with, and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if others don't care/like it too https://github.com/skx/gobasic

Yeah a lot of the early computers wouldn't have the grunt to parse into an AST. Instead they'd write bytecode, or interpret the code at runtime pretty efficiently. Storing programs as bytes instead of ASCII wasn't uncommon either. (e.g. "PRINT" -> 0x02, etc). I wrote a simple BASIC interpreter for golang, and did something a little more high-level, but not by much: https://github.com/skx/gobasic

I've been following a few different BASIC projects over the past few months, it seems that there is a sudden rise of them. Whether nostalgia, or just fun/learning/experimentation is to blame I can't say. My own BASIC is very simple, but easy to embed/extend: https://github.com/skx/gobasic I sometimes consider extending it with WHILE/WEND, named functions, and similar. But then I remember the constraints are part of what makes it interesting to me. I still remember the Christmas when I received 48k Spectrum, with my sisters. The tape-deck didn't work, so my sisters lost interest. I worked my way through the (spiral-bound orange) manual, typing BASIC and having a blast. Later we got a cassette recorder which worked, and I started playing games, and hacking them for infinite lives. I think my initial love/enthusiasm for typing in BASIC

I wrote a simple BASIC interpreter inspired by the Sinclair, over here https://github.com/skx/gobasic

Looks good, you might compare to this implementation of Monkey with a bunch of extensions (such as "objects", regular expressions, and a standard-library written in the language itself): https://github.com/skx/monkey/ A similar idea allows embedded usage of a scripting language, as a filter: https://github.com/skx/evalfilter/ Of course it gets addictive writing little languages, so you'll probably want to have fun and try making more! I went with BASIC: https://github.com/skx/gobasic But then you start thinking about assembly language: https://github.com/skx/math-compiler

I hacked up a simple BASIC interpreter in golang a while back, tons of fun. https://github.com/skx/gobasic I also added a simple HTTP-server, with a <textarea> inside it for writing your program. I figured that server should be called "visual basic" since it allowed you to plot graphs, etc ;)

I started programming on a ZX Spectrum: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html And I had a lot of fun recently writing a simple BASIC interpreter, largely inspired by Sinclair's basic: https://github.com/skx/gobasic I'm pretty pleased with the ability to write images, via a browser-editor, even if it is static and not animated.