On Sun 19 Aug 2018 at 17:03:26 (+0200), Thomas Schmitt wrote: > Hi, > > Curt wrote: > > I ain't no programmer, but sure is butt ugly. > > Yeah. This Yet-Another-BASIC lacks the ON ERROR GOTO gesture. > (Found the booklet. It's HP BASIC 3.0, not 2.0. Newest techology of 1985.)
I thought we were up to version 4.0¹ by 1985, if you're referring to Rocky Mountain BASIC. We ran it on HP 9836s; our 9845B³ was stuck around version 2.1 because the entire OS was contained in ROMs². By 1992 we had migrated all our programs to the TransEra HTBasic "clone" running on variously DOS 3.3, 5.0 and 6.22. (HP maintenance contracts cost a small fortune, though they were absolutely comprehensive and, boy, did we test them.) RMB's ON ERROR statement had not only GOTO, but GOSUB, CALL and RECOVER options, though the latter two weren't useful for me. Would you agree, though, that "BASIC" is the language that must have the biggest contrast between its well-endowed versions and the most dire cr*p. Where would yabasic fit? ¹98613-90051_Basic4.0_LangRef_Jul85.pdf is still on the web, along with stacks of software and hardware manuals of the period, ²eg 09845-91083_asmDevRom_Mar80.pdf ³If you've not come across the 9845 machine, it was in my experience unique, in that you could edit the program while it was executing, not even having to pause it. The Assembler extension module mentioned above was also unusual in that it executed on a coprocessor, so it could run in parallel with the RMB program; and it also did not answer to the keyboard's keys like [PAUSE] and [STOP]. Cheers, David.
