[Coco] rom basics

[Arthur Flexser]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Frederick D Provoncha wrote: I don't clearly recall
myself exactly what GWBASIC consisted of.  But the same similarities also
exist between CoCo Basic and Qbasic for the PC, I believe.

Art


> 
> On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 02:17:18 -0400 (EDT) Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu>
> writes:
> > On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Frederick D Provoncha wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > In my opinion one of the STRONGEST qualities of the Color Computer 
> > when
> > > you compare it to other 8-bitters was it's version of BASIC. I 
> > dabbled in
> > > programming BASIC on the Commodore PET, C-64, Apple ][e, and the 
> > TI
> > > 99/4a. The Coco's version of BASIC was better than all of them. 
> > C-64's
> > > and the Apple's in particular were terrible. It was even better 
> > than the
> > > IBM PCjr's. A friend of mine once wrote a short program on his 
> > PCjr and
> > > shared the code with me. I took it and wrote the same program on 
> > my Coco2
> > > in about half as many program lines.
> > > 
> > > Though it deviated substantially from standard BASIC though, I do 
> > recall
> > > the TI 99/4a's BASIC being pretty good and powerful. The Coco's 
> > was still
> > > better though. To clear the screen in TI BASIC you used the 
> > command 'CALL
> > > CLEAR'. In Coco ECB it's simply 'CLS'.
> > > 
> > > Graphics commands, such as 'PAINT', 'LINE', 'CIRCLE', and 
> > especially
> > > 'DRAW', were way ahead of their time.
> > > 
> > 
> > The similarity between the CoCo's Basic and GWBASIC for the PC, and
> > the fact that both came from Microsoft, leads me to speculate that
> > they were written by the same author, Mark Chamberlin, and that CoCo 
> > Basic
> > may have been stronger than it otherwise would have been because it 
> > was
> > seen as a sort of preliminary version of a Basic that was forseen 
> > for the
> > PC.  The similarities are particularly apparent with respect to the
> > graphics commands you mention.
> > 
> > Art
> 
> I don't recall, it's been too long. Was the version of BASIC in the IBM
> PCjr called GWBASIC? I did notice strong similarities between the code my
> friend shared with me and the Coco's ECB. He used a lot of LINE commands,
> which were very similar in syntax to the Coco's LINE command. Did GWBASIC
> have the 'DRAW' command. My friend certainly didn't use it in his code.
> 
> Fred Provoncha
> 
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