Load BASIC programs from text

[Stefan]

Hello everyone!

The last week I've been working on a program that loads a BASIC program from a text file.

After some (or a lot of) fiddling I finally got it to work.

Some notes on the source file format:

• 
  There are no line numbers in the source file
  


• 
  Instead you define labels on lines you want to jump to with GOTO or GOSUB
  


• 
  Labels must be defined at the start of a line, but it's OK to have leading blank spaces
  


• 
  A label must start with one of the letters A-Z. The following characters may be A-Z or numbers 0-9
  


• 
  The symbol table stores the first 12 letters of a label
  


• 
  Line breaks are marked by a single LF or CR
  

The work flow:

• 
  You edit the source file on the X16 using X16Edit or any other available editor
  


• 
  Store the source file on the SDCARD
  


• 
  Load the BASIC loader program, and run it
  


• 
  Enter the source file name
  


• 
  Type RUN to run the loaded BASIC program
  

Enclosed is a video showing this work flow.

I need to do some more work on this before publishing.

[Scott Robison]

Seems very similar to my BASIC Preprocessor project.

[Stefan]

True.

I forgot that you had made that program. I must look at your solution again.

There are some differences as far as I can tell:

• 
  Source format is different
  


• 
  My program does not support long variable names
  


• 
  My program outputs BASIC code directly to RAM
  

[Scott Robison]

Right. I understand it's not identical, just similar. That's no reason *not* to do it though. Just commenting. ?

[Stefan]

I did now publish a first version of my loader.

You find it here: https://www.commanderx16.com/forum/index.php?/files/file/192-load-basic-programs-from-text-files/