SUPER BASIC, sometimes SBASIC for short, is an advanced dialect of the BASIC programming language offered on Tymshare's SDS 940 systems starting in 1968 and available well into the 1970s.
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15 Facts About SUPER BASIC
1.
2.
SUPER BASIC greatly improved string handling over the rudimentary system in Dartmouth, introducing the LEFT, MID and RIGHT string functions, simple string concatenation and other features.
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3.
Original Dartmouth SUPER BASIC was released in 1964 but was largely experimental at the time.
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4.
In keeping with the overall Dartmouth BASIC concept, SUPER BASIC was a compile and go system that compiled the source code when the program was run.
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5.
SUPER BASIC had two commands for this, the typical RUN seen in most BASICs, as well as START which did the same thing.
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6.
Additionally, SUPER BASIC provided alternate forms of the range definition using WHILE and UNTIL, whereas most other languages used completely separate loop structures for these.
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7.
SUPER BASIC did not require variables to be typed, a variable could hold a number at one point and a string at another, a side-effect of the way they were stored.
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8.
In most dialects of SUPER BASIC, variables are created on-the-fly as they are encountered in the code, and generally set to zero when created.
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9.
In contrast with other BASICs, SUPER BASIC allowed one to define the range of one or both of the dimensions, assuming 1 if not defined.
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10.
SUPER BASIC added XOR, EQV for "equivalence" and IMP for "implication".
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11.
SUPER BASIC allowed this, which resulted in the somewhat confusing behavior of, which, following operator precedence, assigns 5 to B and then returns true or false if A=B.
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12.
Additionally, SUPER BASIC added the additional statement TEXT which took a second parameter to define the length of the string elements, so TEXT A:10 makes an array with 12 elements of 10 characters each, while TEXT B:15 is an array of six elements, 5.
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13.
SUPER BASIC included operators for = for comparison and + for concatenation.
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14.
SUPER BASIC included pseudo-variables for PI and DPI, the later being double-precision, as well as the previously mentioned EPS to represent the smallest possible value.
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15.
SUPER BASIC included two forms of print formatting that could be used with the PRINT statement.
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