The EndBASIC programming language - CLI

EndBASIC is an interpreter for a BASIC-like language and is inspired by Amstrad's Locomotive BASIC 1.1 and Microsoft's QuickBASIC 4.5. Like the former, EndBASIC intends to provide an interactive environment that seamlessly merges coding with immediate visual feedback. Like the latter, EndBASIC offers higher-level programming constructs and strong typing.

EndBASIC offers a simplified and restricted environment to learn the foundations of programming and focuses on features that can quickly reward the programmer. These features include things like a built-in text editor, commands to render graphics, and commands to interact with the hardware of a Raspberry Pi. Implementing this kind of features has priority over others such as performance or a much richer language.

EndBASIC is written in Rust and runs both on the web and locally on a variety of operating systems and platforms, including macOS, Windows, and Linux.

EndBASIC is free software under the Apache 2.0 License.

What's in this crate?

endbasic provides the command line binary for the EndBASIC language. This binary offers an interpreter for scripts as well as a fully-interactive REPL. Launch the interpreter by typing endbasic and then type HELP inside it for further guidance.

Interactive usage

endbasic comes with a REPL command-line interface that offers fancy line editing features and built-in documentation for all available features. You can start the interactive interface by typing:

endbasic

and you can exit it at any time by pressing CTRL+D.

The HELP command lets you obtain a list of all possible commands as well as detailed usage information for any of them.

The interactive interface has support for manipulating a stored program: that is, a program that lives in the memory of the interpreter. To get started, use the EDIT command to enter new lines into the program, LIST to inspect its contents and RUN to execute it. You can save and restore programs from disk by using the SAVE and LOAD commands respectively, which by default are backed by an endbasic subdirectory under your Documents folder. You can then inspect the contents of this directory with the DIR command.

The lines that EDIT prints during program editing are not meaningful to the program and only exist to support interactive editing. Line numbers are typically multiples of ten to allow you to insert lines in-between others. For example: if your program previously had lines 20 and 30 but you forgot a statement between those, you can do EDIT 15 to enter that statement. If you run out of lines, or if you want to tidy up their numbers to be multiples of ten again, use the RENUM command.

Finally, use CLEAR to erase all variables set in the interactive editor, and NEW to also erase the stored program from memory and start afresh.

Scripting usage

You can give endbasic the name of a program to execute:

endbasic some-program.bas

It is important to note that some features (like the HELP builtin command or all stored program manipulation commands) are only available in the interactive interface.

Examples

You can peek into the tests subdirectory of this repository to see actual EndBASIC code samples. Look for all files with a .bas extension.