sinclair

Sinclair BASIC

Keywords

The extremely popular and successful computers from England-based legendary Sinclair Research were shipped with BASICs developed by Nine Tiles Networks Ltd, also an English company. These BASICs were pretty similar among its own evolutions and also to Microsoft BASIC-80-based interpreters which were so common at the time. It was not hard to port programs written for the Sinclair Spectrum to a MSX machine, for example.

Most keywords from its first version, the 4KB BASIC for the tiny ZX80, were ported to its later versions (though with different capabilities sometimes), so the ZX80 version is the Sinclair baseline referred to by this site's Keywords section. It was an incomplete implementation of ANSI Minimal BASIC with integer-only arithmetic in order to fit into 4KB of ROM.

Where it is/was used

  • Sinclair ZX-80

Noteworthy characteristics

  • In the 4K version, every line of code must start with a command, due to the way the REPL interface and keyboard entry were implemented. This made LET mandatory in assignments, unlike most other BASICs.

Environment and usage

Extensions

Several extensions were published by third-party companies and by Sinclair itself.

Curiosities

Influenced by

Influence for

Versions and successors

  • The ZX-81 brought a number of new keywords and a mostly complete BASIC for its time
  • Spectrum BASIC got colors and graphical instructions

References

, ,