My latest fun project is a BASIC interpreter called Acidica. Classic BASIC is an old-school language first developed in 1964 that saw an explosion of implementations on microcomputers in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s much more primitive than the Visual Basic that you might be familiar with.

A simple BASIC program:

10 INPUT "What is your name"; U$
20 PRINT "Hello "; U$
30 INPUT "How many stars do you want"; N
40 S$ = ""
50 FOR I = 1 TO N
60 S$ = S$ + "*"
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S$
90 INPUT "Do you want more stars"; A$
100 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN 90
110 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)
120 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN 30
130 PRINT "Goodbye ";U$
140 END

Run it, and you get this:

What is your name? Ned
Hello Ned
How many stars do you want? 10
**********
Do you want more stars? y
How many stars do you want? 20
********************
Do you want more stars? n
Goodbye Ned

The wide variety of BASIC flavors meant I first had to decide what to implement. I found Vintage BASIC and used its spec, both because it is concisely described, and because it has an implementation I could run to double-check behavior when I had questions. The site also has a collection of runnable games from Creative Computing magazine, which I remember fondly.

This was a perfect vacation-week project. It has no real-world consequences. It had some interesting problems to puzzle through. It was testable. It satisfied some nostalgia for my earlier computing days. It was bounded enough to be “done”.

In those ways, it’s very similar to a vacation project of mine from four years ago: Stilted, an implementation of PostScript.

Acidica is not useful for writing new programs, only because BASIC itself is so difficult. There is no scoping beyond single-line functions, variables names can be as long as you want but only the first two letters and first digit are significant. Keywords are recognized anywhere, so FACTOR can’t be variable name because it has TO in the middle. The only control structures are FOR, IF, and GOTO. It’s something of a testament to human persistence that programs like three-dimensional tic-tac-toe can be written in it.

As a side project, I could choose my development style: no real type checking (partly because BASIC’s values would be awkward to squeeze into static typing), and very few docstrings. There are lots of tests, but only integration tests: every test is a BASIC program to run, with a check for the correct output and/or the expected error.

To be honest, the “only integration tests” approach was kind of a pain, but I stuck with it and resisted the temptation to add unit tests along the way.

Another choice I made: no AI. I like writing programs. I get a deeper sense of the thing I am building when I have my fingers in the clay. Since there was no deadline, or even any reason to ever finish the project, I could take my time and not be rushed.

But I like the result. I enjoyed the time I spent working on it. I liked being able to stop and devote pure thinking time while doing other things when I got to the next hurdle. The next steps here might be to use this project as a test bed for some development ideas. Or maybe add a BASIC-to-Python transpiler. Or maybe it’s done.