11 Facts About Commodore BASIC

Commodore BASIC, known as PET BASIC or CBM-BASIC, is the dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Commodore International's 8-bit home computer line, stretching from the PET of 1977 to the C128 of 1985.

Some Commodore BASIC variants supplied BLOAD and BSAVE commands that worked like their counterparts in Applesoft BASIC, loading or saving bitmaps from specified memory locations.

However, since all Commodore BASIC keywords were stored in memory as single byte tokens, this was a convenience for statement entry rather than an optimization.

All Commodore BASIC commands were tokenized and took up 1 byte in memory no matter which way they were entered.

Unique feature of Commodore BASIC is the use of control codes to perform tasks such as clearing the screen or positioning the cursor within a program; these can be invoked either by issuing a command where X corresponds to the control code to be issued or by pressing the key in question between quote marks, thus pressing ? Shift+CLR HOME following a quote mark will cause BASIC to display the visual representation of the control code which is then acted upon at program execution.

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Order of execution of Commodore BASIC lines was not determined by line numbering; instead, it followed the order in which the lines were linked in memory.

Denoting any variable as integer simply causes Commodore BASIC to convert it back to floating point, slowing down program execution and wasting memory as each percent sign takes one additional byte to store.

Statement, used to start machine language programs, was added by Commodore and was not in the original Microsoft BASIC code, which featured only the USR function for invoking machine language routines.

From a modern programming point of view, the earlier versions of Commodore BASIC presented a host of bad programming traps for the programmer.

Every line of a Microsoft Commodore BASIC program was assigned a line number by the programmer.

This, along with the advanced screen editor included with Commodore BASIC gave the programming environment a REPL-like feel; programmers could insert and edit program lines at any screen location, interactively building the program.