12 Facts About Wang BASIC

Wang BASIC is a series of BASIC programming languages for computers from Wang Laboratories.

Wang BASIC closely followed the original Dartmouth BASIC in syntax, but was an interpreter as opposed to a compile-and-go system.

Original Wang BASIC for the 2200 is a relatively standard version of the Dartmouth BASIC concept, and will be familiar to users of any common BASIC interpreters like Microsoft BASIC.

In common with other "high end" BASICs of the era, Wang BASIC offered formatted output with PRINTUSING and a separate "image".

In contrast to later BASICs which used dynamic length strings on a heap, like Microsoft, Wang BASIC set all strings to a default length of 16 characters and would ignore any characters assigned beyond that.

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In keeping with the Dartmouth model, Wang BASIC included DATA statements for storing constants within the program code, and these were read using the READ statement, which started at the first data element and then moved a pointer forward to the next element with every READ.

In Wang BASIC, this was accomplished with the COM and LOAD statements.

Original Wang BASIC came in several versions differing in the amount of ROM-based microcode, and thus the number of keywords supported.

Wang BASIC in the 2200B was a major expansion of the 2200A version.

Wang BASIC's CONVERT had a second mode that took a format specifier like PRINTUSING and used that to convert a number to a formatted string in a fashion analogous to C's sprintf.

The most notable change was that Wang BASIC was no longer stored in read-only memory and was instead loaded from disk at boot time, which allowed it to be easily patched in the field to fix bugs.

On 2 April 1981, at the Hannover Fair, Wang BASIC announced a major update of the MVP series microcode.