Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 25th Aug 2006 09:03 UTC, submitted by anonymous
Adam Dunkels, well-known author of the Contiki operating system and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, has written a really small BASIC interpreter called uBASIC in about 700 lines of C code. It is intended to be a very small scripting language for systems where memory really is at a premium such as deeply embedded systems which may have as little as a few hundreds of bytes of RAM. It provides an interesting look into how to write a very lightweight script interpreter.
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Member since:
2006-02-10
8-bit home computers with built in Basic. These were the good times ;-)
Now about uBasic: If you are looking for a small, trivially portable interpreted language, there's Forth. More powerful than Basic, most would say. Weirder too.
Used in the 70s and 80s to make the best out of computers with 1KB RAM and a few Khz CPUs.
Nowadays used in BIOS, boot loaders (FreeBSD's loader and others), embedded and such.
Trivially portable: Most of Forth is written in Forth itself and you only need to implement a few hooks in assembly.
Can act as an OS for itself. Cooperative multitasking, nonetheless! Yet it fits in ROM or a few disk sectors.
Have a look, and have fun!