Preprocessor for BASIC8 on PDP8 TSS/8

[Rick Adams]

Even though it's a pretty early and thus primitive BASIC implementation, I like playing around with BASIC8 on the TSS/8 OS, because it's the first BASIC I ever learned on.

But typing BASIC programs into BASIC8 drives me mad; I'd rather compose them on my laptop and paste them in.  I found that if I put "set console speed=2400" into the file /opt/pidp8i/share/boot/2.script that I could paste into TSS/8 without problems.

But you can't get away with much of a program without filling memory, so I needed to remove spaces, concatenate lines and so forth to conserve space.  That plus having to assign line numbers was tiresome.

So I came up with a preprocessor to take BASIC code in a more modern-looking format and massage the source:

* convert the source to upper case,
* remove comments,
* assign missing line numbers,
* concatenate lines,
* consolidate DATA statements,
* and remove extraneous whitespace.

Then I can take the source that comes out of the preprocessor and paste it in.

If that sounds useful to the few people still messing with TSS/8 rather than the (relatively) more modern OS/8, take a look:

yggdrasilradio/b8pp: BASIC8 preprocessor for PDP8 TSS8 (github.com)

[Ken Hansen]

Rick,

If you don't mind, I'd like to go down the rabbit hole a bit regarding one of your motivations for writing the preprocessor...

I'm curious about the issue pasting in code. How are you connecting to your PiDP-8? Are you telnet/ssh into your system? Have you considered using a physical serial port? I'm wondering if that would make a difference, but as I sit here typing this I'm realizing that the serial port may not have any handshaking or other mechanism to control flow (not a serial expert, but I know 'full' serial ports have several signals that could be useful, but that are 'out of band' and not available over 3 wire serial connections...

So, I'm curious, is the "too fast" issue specific to how you choose to communicate with your PiDP8?

Ken

On Mar 8, 2024, at 11:04, Rick Adams <rick.a...@gmail.com> wrote:

Even though it's a pretty early and thus primitive BASIC implementation, I like playing around with BASIC8 on the TSS/8 OS, because it's the first BASIC I ever learned on.

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[Rick Adams]

I use telnet from my Windows laptop, or my iPad.  When I paste in any appreciable amount of text, the text is garbled.

[Clem Cole]

Rick - I have add that issue also. I have not messed with TSS in a while but, Kermit12 is known to work on DOS/8 https://web.archive.org/web/20121006081947/http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ftp/archives/k12.zip

Clem

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[Rick Adams]

Also, I notice that OS/8 does not have this problem.

[timr...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I too learned BASIC on a TSS/8 system back in 1969.  Those were the days.  Dial in TTY to the local community college that ran the TSS/8 system.  The sound and smell of a TTY are still great to me.  I had a TTY long ago for my Altair system.  Gave it away also many years back.  I have not tried using Basic on TSS/8 on my PiDP-8.  I have it running TSS/8 just to see the lights count up.  I may give this a try to see if I can figure out what happens.

   Tim Radde