bscript

portable, fast, lightweight BASIC interpreter


BScript is a (yet another) BASIC interpreter. It is free software and open-sourced, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. You can use BScript to teach BASIC to your students, write understandable shell scripts (good bye, spaghetti code!), automate simple tasks, or even write a game!

The following BASIC code will be executed by BScript without problem:

print "Hello, world!"

Features

Documentation

Documentation for BScript isn't yet available. However, it's so simple that you can use this webpage for reference. The following might also be helpful:

Subdirectory examples/ in the source-code tarball contains many interesting examples which you might want to try.

Installation

BScript is always available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/bscript/. The latest stable version is 0.3, you can download it as bscript-0.3.tar.gz.

BScript only comes in source-code. In order to compile and install it on your system, unpack the source-code tarball and simply execute the following commands:

./configure
make
make install

Note: you need lex and yacc to compile BScript. However, flex and bison would be fine replacements.

BScript can be compiled on Linux, other Unices, and Microsoft Windows.

If you want to use the development version of BScript, checkout the source using anonymous CVS (when asked for password, just press Enter), so something like this:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bscript co bscript

Copyright and License

BScript © 1999-2004 Ariya Hidayat <ariya@kde.org>

BScript program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Development

As for the time being, development of BScript is suspended due to my limited time. If anyone is interested in taking over the maintainance of BScript (as well as further development tasks), please contact me at ariya@kde.org.

To be able to run at reasonable speed, BScript parses the BASIC code into sort-of p-code which will be executed by a virtual machine. Bear in mind that BScript was born when I learned lex, yacc, and virtual machine at first time and therefore might have inherent design mistakes.

Author

BScript is developed by Ariya Hidayat <ariya@kde.org>

You can find more info about me at http://ariya.pandu.org.