BBC Basic Console Mode

The Console Mode editions take their input from stdin and send their output to stdout so may be run at a regular command prompt or in a client-server context (e.g. through a network or serial connection, or even via the internet). The console/terminal is assumed to be VT-100 compatible, which the great majority are, in which case most of the standard BBC BASIC VDU commands behave as expected (with the exception of graphics commands), although text viewports are not supported. Alternatively these editions may be used in CGI ( Common Gateway Interface ) applications, or as a shell replacement. Common shell commands may be accessed by prefixing them with a star (*), in the usual BBC BASIC way.

Limited program entry and editing capabilities are provided in Immediate Mode by means of the AUTO, DELETE, EDIT, LIST [IF], LISTO, LOAD, NEW, RENUMBER and SAVE commands, but in the case of large programs you are recommended to use either the BBC BASIC for Windows or BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 IDE . The LOAD command will load a program in internal (tokenised) format or as a plain-text file (line numbers will be added if necessary). A BASIC program may be executed automatically by specifying it as a command-line parameter (it must be in tokenised format) or by giving it the same name as the executable but with a .bbc extension.

The Console Mode editions incorporate an assembler for the appropriate CPU (a 64-bit x86 assembler in the case of the Windows, MacOS and Linux editions, and a 32-bit ARM assembler in the case of the Raspbian edition). You can access Application Program Interface (API) functions from assembler code and from BASIC (using the SYS statement), allowing an experienced programmer to produce sophisticated applications.

These editions are entirely free and may be downloaded for the supported platforms as follows:

In each case the zip file contains the executable, some libraries and a few demonstration BBC BASIC programs; the contents should be extracted to a suitable directory. You may wish to add this directory to your PATH so that the executable and libraries can be accessed from 'anywhere'.