Topic: BASIC 7.0 Reference

[Hydrophilic]

I've completed all the pages that describe Commodore BASIC from version 1.0 up to 7.0 on the wiki.  Although I did not create individual pages for the new v10 commands of the prototype C65, I did at least list them on the main page.
 
These pages describe all the commands, functions, keywords, operators, prepositions, reserved variables, statements, and tokens of the BASIC language used by the 8-bit Commodore machines (up to version 7).  The pages contain numerous cross-references for easy use and a few additional 'concept' pages.
 
They contain numerous details that are often missing (or wrong) in standard references such as The Commodore 128 Programmer's Reference Guide.  Being a wiki, the information is much easier to access (in my opinion) and perhaps more important, can be updated at any time.
 
I created the pages based on prior experience (with C128, C16, C64, Plus/4, and VIC-20 all NTSC), testing in VICE, and references such as the mentioned C128 PRG, The Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide, the Plus/4 System Guide, the VIC-20 System Guide, and others.  The information should be fairly accurate, but being human, some errors or opinions may have snuck in.  Feel free to update any of the pages to correct errors, remove bias, or add new information.
 
I hope this will inspire some new software for the Commodore 128, or at least any of the Commodore 8-bit machines.  I would also like to thank Lance for hosting the wiki and commodore128.org.
 
Over 160 pages of techno babble for your infotainment.  Enjoy!
 

[maraud]

Thanks for doing this, great stuff!  Now I just need to crawl it and make an offline copy to read when I'm bored on an airplane!

[SmallCleverDinosaur]

Wow! Great work! 
 
This will be a great online resource when programming.
 
One thing I saw, under the "Tokens" section you wrote "A final two bytes are used at the beginning of the program to indicate the memory address the program was saved from. This is actually ignored when loading, but it can be useful to guess which computer the program was created for."
 
My memory may be a little rusty, but isn't this true only when using LOAD "PROGRAM",8 (or DLOAD), but when using LOAD "PROGRAM",8,1, these two bytes are read and the program is loaded into memory beginning at that address, right? Or is my memory too rusty?

[Hydrophilic]

Good point!  Loading ,8 ignores the load address and is all that is needed for a BASIC program.  But loading ,8,1 will use the load address so your memory is correct.  I'm sure I pointed these differences out on the LOAD page.

[wte]

Great work! Best summary about Commodore BASIC I've ever seen!

[Hydrophilic]

Thanks, nice to know the work is appreciated.
 
One reason I did it was because both the C128 System Guide and Programmer's Reference Guide often give extremely brief descriptions leaving me to figure things out for myself.  Well that's just fine if you have time to kill and enjoy poking around in BASIC.  But if you are working on a project, it is quite annoying to have to put that aside and waste time testing theories.  I also have some other books detailing Commodore BASIC, but they are more about how they work internaly for use by ML programmers; so not very useful for a BASIC programmer either.