SuperBASIC

SuperBASIC is an advanced variant of the BASIC programming language with many structured programming additions. It was developed at Sinclair Research by Jan Jones during the early 1980s.

Originally SuperBASIC was intended as the BASIC interpreter for a home computer code-named SuperSpectrum, then under development. This project was later cancelled; however, SuperBASIC was subsequently included in the ROM firmware of the Sinclair QL microcomputer (announced in January 1984), also serving as the command line interpreter for the QL's QDOS operating system.

It was one of the first second-generation BASICs to be integrated into a microcomputer's operating system (unlike BBC BASIC which preceded it in 1981), making the OS user-extendable—as done by Linus Torvalds in his formative years.

Reception

BYTE in September 1984 approved of SuperBASIC's improvements over Sinclair BASIC but criticized its "very, very slow" performance on the Byte Sieve, writing that "With a 7.5-MHz 68008, you'd think it would take some effort to get a language to run that slowly". The magazine also noted that SuperBASIC's seven-digit precision made it unsuitable for business use ("you can represent numbers far larger than the number of quarks in the universe, but not the pennies on your balance sheet if your turnover exceeds £99,000").

Advanced features

RESPR for resident procedures, e.g. to extend QDOS

choice of parameters passed to procedures

procedures return parameters as chosen

IF - THEN - ELSE - END IF

FOR - NEXT - EXIT - END FOR

REPeat - NEXT - EXIT - END REPeat

SELect ON - ON - REMAINDER - END SELect

arbitrarily RETurn from within procedures & functions

data type coercion between numeric and string variables

actual parameters passing data type to formal parameters

array operations: slicing, joining etc.

LOCal arrays & (string) variables

AUTOmatic line numbering

relative RESTORE & DATA

The function below illustrates the last eight of these features.