CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO BASIC-80
BASIC-SO is Intel's implementation of disk extended BASIC for Intellec and Intellec Series II Microcomputer Development Systems, which use the Intel Systems Im- plementation Supervisor (ISIS-II), and for Intel Single Board Computers, which use Intel's Real-Time Multitasking Executive (RMX/SO). It offers a quick method of applying the computational and input!output capabilities of the microcomputer development system to a wide range of business, information handling, numeric analysis, and data processing applications.
BASIC-SO can be used with either the ISIS-II or RMX/SO operating systems. Re- quirements for ISIS-II BASIC-80 include an Intellec Microcomputer Development System with at least 4SK of memory space, and one disk drive. RMX/SO BASIC-SO requirements, both hardware and software, are described in Appendix F of this manual.
BASIC-SO includes 21 commands, 39 statements, 4S functions, a line-editing capability, and full disk I/O (both sequential and random access). In addition, user- written functions can be defined, and up to 25 subroutines can be written in other Intel-supported languages (FORTRAN-SO, PL/M-SO, and SOSO/SOS5 assembly language) and called from BASIC-SO.
Intel integer, single-precision floating-point, and double-precision floating-point arithmetic standards are all supported, offering flexible combinations of processing speed and accuracy (up to 16 digits in the range ± 2.2 x -308to ± 1.S x 10308 ) . Arrays can have virtually as many dimensions as needed; the only limit on the number of dimensions that can be specified is the 255-character program statement length.
Hexadecimal and octal integer representation, combined with bitwise Boolean logical operators, make sophisticated mask operations easy. A full range of string functions is available to provide flexibility in manipulating character data.
The disk I/O features include not only the ability to read from and write to disk files, but also the ability to create, rename, change the attributes of, delete, and list the directory of disk files without returning to the operating system.
BASIC-SO requires an Intellec or Intellec Series II microcomputer development system with at least 4SK RAM and ISIS-II operating system (version 3.4 or later).
Operating System Interface
You can invoke BASIC-SO from ISIS-II, or configure RMX-SO BASIC-SO in PROM for boot loading upon restart. Once BASIC is running, you have access to many of the disk file-handling functions as well as the ability to load and save programs.
Invoking BASIC-80
Once you configure RMX/SO BASIC-SO, you will always enter BASIC-SO upon restart.
