Console Mode editions updated to version 0.48

[Richard Russell]

I have updated the BBC BASIC Console Mode editions (BBCTTY) to version 0.48: The main changes in this version are:

• Support for array slicing has been added, using the syntax array(first TO last) or array(row, first TO last).
  
  
• Compound assignment and array arithmetic can now both use the exponentiation operator ^.
  
  
• In the default *HEX32 mode, PRINT~ and STR$~ report an error if the value cannot be expressed as 32-bit hex.
  
  
• Added median.bbc as a demonstration of array slicing (it implements the Quickselect algorithm).
  

The new version can be downloaded from the usual place.

[Richard Russell]

Does your console BASIC run on the RPI Zero W1?

I've no idea, I don't have one.  I don't make available a pre-compiled version for that platform, so you'd need to recompile it from the source code.  I'd be interested to learn what happens if you try.

As regards dependencies, it does rely on compiler extensions and intrinsics supported only by GCC and Clang, but that's not a major limitation in practice.

But the fact that it can successfully be run on the Raspberry Pi Pico, which is little more than a microcontroller, shows that the demands on system resources are not great.

[Richard Russell]

./bbcbasic: /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.29' not found (required by ./bbcbasic)

That's to be expected when running a pre-compiled binary on an entirely different machine!  You must compile it from source.

[Richard Russell]

Thanks Richard for the hints. I assumed if you got Pico going the Zero was already done.

They are quite different devices, with very little in common except the name 'Raspberry Pi'!  I think the Zero runs some variety of Linux doesn't it?  The Pico is a microcontroller and doesn't have an OS as such (just a C runtime library).

Anyway I didn't make the version for the Pico - that's way beyond my skill - it was done by 'Memotech Bill'.  I kept telling him it couldn't work, because my BBC BASIC wasn't designed to run on such a tiny machine with so little memory, but he persevered:

 https://github.com/Memotech-Bill/PicoBB