Lisp Interpreter in Tandy TRS-80/100 Basic

https://m.facebook.com/#!/story.php?story_fbid=10157953582457370&id=780707369

by franze • 7 years ago

105 54 7 years ago

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RodgerTheGreat2• 7 years ago

Facebook has to be the least convenient way this could be hosted. Here's a mirror: https://pastebin.com/raw/Yq5khyQL

macjohnmcc2• 7 years ago

Printed in the magazine and having to type it in was significantly less convenient than Facebook.

Zenst2• 7 years ago

Depends upon perspective.

Can walk into shop and purchase magazine and the magazine owner wouldn't know what you read, when you read it.... Equally the outlay would be just for the magazine compared to internet connection, computer capable of browsing the internet and then still have to transfer it to the TRS-80/100.

Then there was the important aspect many miss-out upon today, when you typed something in from a magazine, you got to know the code over just running a program. You made mistakes, and often the magazines would have erata sections to cover typo's from the last edition and with those mistakes - you learned even more than just hitting run.

reaperducer7• 7 years ago

Printed in the magazine and having to type it in was significantly less convenient than Facebook.

But, apparently, infinitely more resilient!

dukoid2• 7 years ago

Looks more or less like "standard" MS-Basic... Shouldn't be too hard to get it running with vintage-basic.net ?

daveloyall• 7 years ago

`PRINT#-1`

... on line 4500 looks to be some kind of idiom.. I don't see a corresponding `OPEN` statement?

reaperducer7• 7 years ago

Facebook has to be the least convenient way this could be hosted

Compared to the rest of the internet, yes. But for the Model 100 people, this is actually the cream of the crop.

Sadly, information in the Model 100 community is notoriously difficult to get to. Well, not fully "difficult." More like "obnoxious."

Most of the good stuff is on old web sites with many broken links, little documentation, and abysmal navigation. I think the main repository is actually the web site of a guy who died years ago and is kept online, but unmaintained and suffering from severe bitrot, by people about to go the same way.

For interactive discussion, the primary source is a mailing list where people ask the same questions over and over and nobody trims their replies, so you might get a message reply that just says "yep" followed by 150 lines of nested quotes. In digest form, it's simply unusable.

So, amazingly, a Facebook post is a thoroughly modern and convenient way for Model 100 enthusiasts to pass information around, compared to all of the other methods they employ.

zozbot2348• 7 years ago

Most of the good stuff is on old web sites with many broken links, little documentation, and abysmal navigation. I think the main repository is actually the web site of a guy who died years ago and is kept online, but unmaintained and suffering from severe bitrot, by people about to go the same way.

As long as the site(s) have been grabbed by Internet Archive, I'm not sure that this has to be an issue. (I've noticed that the archive.org 'Wayback machine' will even archive some downloads, albeit it's not something that should be counted on.)

firethief• 7 years ago

Facebook posts are the persimmons of bitrot...

zozbot2348• 7 years ago

Blogpost reposting content from 80 Micro Magazine (published sometime in 1982). I assume that the original issue is somewhere in the archive.org collection.

RodgerTheGreat2• 7 years ago

Good thinking. Looks like it might be this: https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1983-...

zozbot2348• 7 years ago

From looking at the contents listing of this issue (400+ pages!) this looks like it might be Part 1 of a LISP tutorial that perhaps was extended in subsequent issues? I wonder if archive.org has got it all.

velcrovan5• 7 years ago

Funny, my current job involves a lot of coding in BASIC (BASIS and ProvideX commercial flavors) and I'm trying to wedge in some Racket where I can. I got my start typing in listings from Rainbow magazine at age 10. (I never thought I'd be writing BASIC for a living though, life took a turn at 35)

byron_fast• 7 years ago

Pretty sure my life would have turned out differently if I'd seen some Lisp listings in Rainbow. I do recall William Barden Jr. making fun of parentheses once.

zozbot2348• 7 years ago

BASIS and ProvideX commercial flavors

Looks like these are both "business" BASIC variants. Wiki has some information about ProvideX, nothing about BASIS (either the company or the BASIC product). What's the point of coding in these sorts of languages at the dawn of the 2020s? Do you still have a lot of legacy code around that can't be forward-ported for some reason? Do you have non-technical folks surveying the code, or even contributing to it?

velcrovan5• 7 years ago

You said it, legacy. Our ERP is essentially a folder of three hundred or so programs that all `RUN` each other and operate on flat files. The coding is mostly maintenance, but we sometimes need to add new programs/modules/menus due to changes in the business. We will be replacing it at some point, hard to say when. I won't miss trying to understand a 30-year old program with line numbers and two-letter variables, but I will bet money that whatever the new system is will be slower and more cumbersome for users.

bitwize• 7 years ago

Business BASIC was all the rage in the 1970s, especially for small to medium-sized businesses, and for good reason. It provided business functions like forms and database access in a manner that was much, much easier to work with than the dominant business language of the time, COBOL. It also had sophisticated programming constructs. For example, while it didn't have structured exception handling like Java, it did have Go-style mandatory error handling; every command that performed I/O had to be passed, as required parameters, the line numbers of where to branch under various error conditions.

Both BASIS and ProvideX are based on Java and provide rather thorough JVM integration. The languages themselves also haven't remained stagnant; they have approximate feature parity with Visual Basic. Both are derived from the MAI Basic Four dialect that was popular in the 1970s.

And yes, some large complicated business software, including the MAS 90 and MAS 200 accounting systems, was built using Basic Four. Porting such a complicated code base would be cost-prohibitive compared to porting the Basic Four dialect of Business BASIC to new environments and just running it as is -- so Business BASIC is COBOL-like in that regard also.

JackRabbitSlim• 7 years ago

Provided the interpreters(/compilers) are still being updated and maintained; What disadvantage would writing in BASIC have?

ProvideX sounds like it's now Sage Group's ERP extension/plugin language. Like SAP's ABAP, Microsoft's "AL", etc.

venatiodecorus• 7 years ago

Broken link, can't access without an account.

andrewshadura• 7 years ago

I can’t access it even with an account.

haunter2• 7 years ago

From the author:

This one is just for fun. When I first learned Lisp in 1981, I did so by reading Winston and Horn's book and writing my own Lisp interpreter. The interpreter was written in Basic on the only system I had access to at the time: a TRS-80 Model I. This interpreter eventually ended up as part of a series of three articles on Lisp that I wrote for 80 Micro, a TRS-80 hobbyist magazine. The first part of the series, which contains the source code for the interpreter itself, is included here. Note that the listing has all optional spaces removed so that I could fit both the interpreter and 1100 (!) cons cells into 16K (!!) of memory

http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/

neonate• 7 years ago

His pdf of the original article is there too: http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/Software/BasicLisp/BasicLisp1.p...

imglorp• 7 years ago

Oh hah, I know this guy from Case Western CS dept. Around 1990 he was writing some Lisp on a TI Explorer lisp machine to simulate cockroach neurons for an AI project.

leoc3• 7 years ago

If we're willing to extend the discussion to microcomputer Lisps targeting machine language, I'll repost an old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019592 :

There were various Z80 and MOS 6502 microcomputer Lisp implementations written back in the '80s, some commercially released at the time, some readily accessible nowadays. https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/3787/how-small-can-a-sc.... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.scheme/Z_2....
(There's one that I'm horribly, horribly overdue to get back to the authors about archiving on the Internet, actually. Anyone who's based in North America and happens to have the hardware and the expertise to recover data from both 5.25" and 8" floppies in some CP/M format?)

kjs32• 7 years ago

You might check out the ClassicCmp (http://www.classiccmp.org/) or Vintage Computer Foundation (http://vcfed.org/wp/) mailing lists. There are folks on there with extensive expertise and equipment for recovering and archiving data.

leoc3• 7 years ago

Thanks!

Lord_Nightmare• 7 years ago

I've got access to an 8" drive as well as plenty of 5.25" drives, and the hardware to do flux images. There are others with access to similar hardware. As kjs3 suggested, contacting people via the classiccmp and vcfed lists is a good idea.

LeServal3• 7 years ago

Hi... I'm the guy who ported this, which was actually not too difficult, as the original gentleman, to whom all honour belongs, left good hints. Most "issues" where really just IFs without THENs. There were only two errors I saw in Ira Goldking's source, a wrong line number and a THRN instead of THEN. This is a link for those not on Facebook: https://pastebin.com/2Mih71eF

eschaton• 7 years ago

Any chance of putting it on github, perhaps even starting with the original?

LeServal3• 7 years ago

Chaire o eschaton!

As per your request:

https://github.com/KedalionDaimon/LispForTandy

LeServal3• 7 years ago

Hi everybody,

I put it also here as per eschaton's request:

https://github.com/KedalionDaimon/LispForTandy

leoc3• 7 years ago

You know what else was written in BASIC? The original Smalltalk interpreter https://youtu.be/pACoq7r6KVI?t=1189 . ("I'm not ashamed, I got it going quickly" - Dan Ingalls.) Obviously this was just a scratch implementation of what became Smalltalk-72, rather than a Smalltalk-80.

perl4ever• 7 years ago

There was a TRS-80 with a 68000...

Also, I know that ELIZA was available for TRS-DOS (which I think ran on the Z80) and wasn't that based on Lisp?

simplify3• 7 years ago

I'd wondered if there was a Color Computer variant and indeed there was/is: From Hot Coco, April 1984 http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Magazines...

Now to test it out.

Lisp Interpreter in Tandy TRS-80/100 Basic

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