SD-8516 Stellar Basic V1.0

Dennis Allison’s 1975 article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal was a key moment in the history of Computer Science. It contained a formal specification of Tiny BASIC, a BASIC that could be implemented in less than 4 KB.

Stellar BASIC is very much in the same vein as Tiny BASIC, and is intended to evolve over time.

• Line-numbered programs
• LET (often optional)
• PRINT
• INPUT
• IF-THEN
• GOTO
• GOSUB and RETURN
• FOR-NEXT
• Usually only access to integer variables and integer based math
• Single letter variables (ex. A, B, Z)

• No floating-point math
• Very limited strings
• No arrays
• No file I/O
• Minimal error messages
• Very limited editing commands

Some versions stored programs as text, some as tokenized program code to save space.

10 LET A = 1
20 PRINT A
30 A = A + 1
40 IF A <= 10 THEN GOTO 20
50 END

Stellar BASIC will allow this even shorter form:

10 A=1
20 ?A
30 A=A+1
40 IF A<=10 GOTO 20

(? is shorthand for PRINT.)

Notable Tiny BASIC implementations

• Palo Alto Tiny BASIC (Dennis Allison)
• Li-Chen Wang’s Tiny BASIC
• 6800 Tiny BASIC
• NASCOM Tiny BASIC
• Apple I BASIC (inspired by Tiny BASIC ideas)
• Micro-Soft 8080 BASIC (larger, but influenced by Tiny BASIC work)