[TUHS] v7 bas - "Ken Thompson's BASIC"

[TUHS] v7 bas - "Ken Thompson's BASIC"

[Will Senn]

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So, I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't really make sense of the 
bas command in v7. In sysv2, it works and is similar enough to modern 
dialects that I was able to get a simple example working, but with v7, 
the best I was able to do was use it interactively, as a calculator. 
Then I went looking for v7 videos on youtube and came across this Dr. 
Dave's Diversions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZUMNZTUJos

In it Dr. Dave demos a few simple versions of 99 bottles of beer in v7. 
Wow! I wondered how he'd glommed the inner workings of bas - did he read 
a book, just know it naturally, phone a friend, or what? Well, as it 
turned out, he... wait for it... read the bas(1) man page! Wha?! 
Ridiculous. So, I pulled out my v7 phone book and read the bas(1) man 
page and sure enough, it was all there... how '_' is used for negation, 
how those arcane for loops work, arrays?!, function calls?!, etc and so 
on, all in 3 short pages.

So, two observations:

1. Those man pages from back in the day - wow. So terse, yet so well 
written. With a little help from a friend (thanks, Dr Dave), they're 
really all you need, sometimes.

2. Those early apps - wow. So obscure these days, but so ahead of their 
time, too (thanks, Ken for making Dec 2021 interesting by doing what you 
did back in the early 70's).


And a question (you knew it was coming): Besides the bas(1) page, is 
there anything else written on Ken's basic out there in the wild? Oh, 
and a bonus question, draw and erase from v5 appear to still be around 
in v7, but not documented in the man page. Did it work and has anyone 
written a Tektronix 611 emulator that works with v7?

Thanks,

Will

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Re: [TUHS] v7 bas - "Ken Thompson's BASIC"

[Nigel Williams]

Regarding this BASIC or something contemporaneous does anyone recall
the (perhaps) apocryphal story that an early version was written in
PDP-11 assembler in a single afternoon?

A few times I've gone looking for the original comment, I assume it
was in a UNIX newsletter or in one of the USENET groups, but I've
never found it.