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scelbal wikipedia jump to content main menu main menu move to sidebar hide navigation main page contents current events random article about wikipedia contact us contribute help learn to edit community portal recent changes upload file special pages search search appearance donate create account log in personal tools donate create account log in contents move to sidebar hide top 1 history 2 description 3 language features toggle language features subsection 3 1 commands 3 1 1 immediate mode only 3 1 2 immediate or program mode 3 2 functions 4 extensions toggle extensions subsection 4 1 math functions supplement 4 2 string supplement 5 references toggle references subsection 5 1 citations 5 2 bibliography 5 3 external links toggle the table of contents scelbal add languages add links article talk english read edit view history tools tools move to sidebar hide actions read edit view history general what links here related changes upload file permanent link page information cite this page get shortened url switch to legacy parser print export download as pdf printable version in other projects wikidata item appearance move to sidebar hide from wikipedia the free encyclopedia 1976 programming language scelbal short for scientific elementary basic language is a version of the basic programming language released in 1976 for the scelbi and other early intel 8008 and 8080 based microcomputers like the mark 8 later add ons to the language included an extended math package and string handling the original version required 8 kb of ram while the additions demanded at least 12 kb the language was published in book form with introductory sections followed by flowcharts and then the 8008 assembler code the book described ways to save more memory turning off arrays for instance and how the user could add their own new features to the language history edit the primary author of scelbal is mark arnold who was a high school student in 1974 when the scelbi was announced arnold was friends with professors at the university of wyoming uw and through them had arranged to have an account on their sigma 7 mainframe computer the first version of what became scelbal was written for this machine later that year he wrote an 8008 cross compiler on that platform arnold entered uw in 1975 and contacted nat wadsworth one of the founders of scelbi pitching the idea of a compiled version of basic for their new platform this would be a multi pass system that would save the intermediate versions on cassette tape this would be very tedious to use but would produce programs that would run on the 4 kb 8h models of the system wadsworth favored an interpreter which would require 8 kb which would be available on the new 8b models of the system the language used floating point routines published by wadsworth in 1975 in machine language programming for the 8008 it took wadsworth several months to finally arrange a contract which included sending arnold an 8b development system this significantly delayed the release of the language into 1976 arnold speculated that lacking these delays scelbal could have been released at about the same time as altair basic in late 1975 it was first presented in a lengthy article in the second issue of dr dobb s journal in february 1976 1 the release of sclebal was announced in an advertisement in byte s june 1976 issue the ad did not specifically link the language to the scelbi platform instead it simply offered itself in book form as a complete source listing to create a version of basic on any 8008 or 8080 system with the requisite 8 kb of ram the book s price was 49 about 277 in 2025 2 description edit scelbal used a 32 bit four byte floating point format for numeric calculations with a 23 bit mantissa 1 bit sign for the mantissa a 7 bit exponent and 1 bit sign for the exponent these were organized in reverse order with the least significant byte of the mantissa in the first byte followed by the middle and then most significant byte with the sign in the high bit the exponent came last again with the sign in the high bit 3 the manual provides well documented assembly code for the entire math package including entry points and usage notes 4 32 bit formats were common in this era while later versions of basic starting with microsoft basic for the mos 6502 generally adopted a 40 bit five byte format for added precision 5 scelbal was otherwise similar to other basic dialects including early ms versions like altair basic lacking string variables and operators and a number of mathematic functions other differences were less pronounced the if statement had an optional form if goto that removed the need for then if x y goto 100 6 it also retained the ms style short form for the same concept if x y then 100 it also allowed conditional execution of other statements such as if x y then print x 7 the base language did not support string handling although literal constant strings could be used in print and had the supporting functions of chr to print non printable characters and tab to provide layout oddly the system required ascii codes to have the high bit set so to convert from normal ascii to scelbi character codes one had to add or subtract 128 for instance print hello chr 172 chr 160 world to produce the string hello world in the output 8 input would normally read the user entered text as a number but allowed the dollar sign to indicate the value should be read as the scelbi code instead for instance input a would read the user input 1 into a as the floating point value 1 while input a would result in a being set to 177 49 ascii for 1 128 additionally when the dollar sign is used the traditional prompt is not printed and command returned to the language as soon as a single character is entered instead of waiting for the carriage return as in the normal case 8 among the few other differences was that the new command found in ms which clears out existing program code and data is called scr for scratch 9 and the usr function which called a machine language routine was udf for user defined function 10 udf allowed a single floating point parameter to be passed to the user defined function whose machine language code must have been loaded into memory at a fixed location ahead of runtime 11 error codes were reduced to two letters and code for load and save were provided in boilerplate form and expected to be implemented when ported to different platforms 12 line numbers could be between 1 and 999999 10 whereas most basics used a 16 bit integer and thus supported lines from 1 to 32767 or 1 to 65535 language features edit taken from the 1976 manual unless otherwise noted 13 commands edit immediate mode only edit referred to as executive mode in the documentation scr scratch equivalent to ms new list run load save immediate or program mode edit print input like ms could accept multiple variables input a b c did not include a prompt string let like ms the let was optional so 15 let x 10 and 15 x 10 are equivalent if then if goto alternate form of if then goto it appears the spaced version go to was not supported gosub return for to step next as in ms step is optional and assumed to be 1 next required a variable unlike later ms versions rem end dim arrays worked as in ms but were optional and could be turned off to save memory only single dimension arrays were supported and the total number of elements for all arrays combined was 64 numbers functions edit int sgn abs sqr rnd as in ms takes a dummy variable and returns a value between 0 and 1 chr note the lack of the found in ms which uses chr tab udf extensions edit scelbi published two extensions to the system the mathematical functions supplement and the strings supplement math functions supplement edit the mathematical functions supplement added five new transcendental functions sin cos exp log and atn 14 string supplement edit the string supplement was somewhat larger than the math functions including a number of new features strings could be up to 80 characters long and the system could hold a total of 64 string variables any one of those 64 or all of them could be one dimensional arrays but the total number still had to be 64 strings in total oddly string arrays did not require a dim statement 15 in contrast to ms basic and the dartmouth basic string handling that inspired it scelbi used the slicing style of string manipulation found in contemporary basics like sds basic hp time shared basic and northstar basic or the later atari basic instead of using functions like left right mid to access substrings the array access syntax was used with a colon preceding the starting point and optionally a semicolon preceding the length as scelbal also supported string arrays the first number in the array accessors was the array index and was optional if the variable was not an array so for instance the code 15 10 let a hello 20 print a 2 3 would result in ell being printed to the output if an array was used the syntax required the array index in the first parameter 15 100 let a 1 hello 150 let a 2 world 200 print a 2 2 3 would result in orl being printed to the output scelbal also allowed omitting the semicolon which specifies the characters from the starting point to the end of the string so for instance the code 210 print a 2 2 would result in orld being printed to the output although similar to sds basic there is a major difference in the way this works in comparison to the other basics that used slicing syntax in that the last parameter is the length not a position for instance in atari basic the similar looking code 16 20 print a 2 3 would instead output el as the instruction translates to print all characters between positions 2 and 3 in this fashion scelbal works in a fashion more similar to ms basic where the equivalents would be 17 20 print mid a 2 3 and 210 print right a 2 2 to add full support for strings the supplement replaced the original chr with chr which matched the syntax of its ms counterpart 15 likewise input was modified so string variables worked like numeric ones waiting for the carriage return and then assigning the entire user input to the associated string variable 18 it also added the support functions len and asc 15 and val to convert a string containing a numeric value to a string representation of that number as in ms concatenation used the operator 18 references edit citations edit arnold mark wadsworth nat february 1976 scelbal a higher level language for 8008 8080 systems dr dobb s journal pp 30 53 shocking byte june 1976 p 47 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 10 1 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 10 steil michael 20 october 2008 create your own version of microsoft basic for 6502 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 14 10 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 2 3 1 2 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 14 16 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 14 1 1 2 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 14 17 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 14 3 arnold wadsworth 1976 p 14 18 arnold wadsworth 1976 math 1977 p 1 1 2 3 4 5 strings 1977 p 1 small david ed 1983 atari strings and text handling the creative atari creative computing strings 1977 p 3 1 2 strings 1977 p 2 bibliography edit arnold mark wadsworth nat 1976 scelbal a higher level language for 8008 8080 systems pdf scelbi computer consulting arnold mark 1977 scelbal mathematical functions supplement scelbi computer consulting arnold mark 1977 scelbal strings supplement scelbi computer consulting external links edit a javascript simulator of 8008 preloaded with scelbal a javascript simulator of 8008 preloaded with scelbal math and string supplements an improved javascript simulator preloaded with scelbal object code for published scelbal in intel hex format mike willegal s scelbal page mike willegal s scelbi os x emulator which can run scelbal v t e dialects of the basic programming language list classic microsoft microsoft basic trs 80 basics level i level ii iii thomson basic 1 0 texas instruments ti basic calculators ti extended basic aka xbasic ti basic 83 hewlett packard hp time shared basic rocky mountain basic hp basic locomotive software locomotive basic mallard basic microcomputers atom basic integer basic north star basic scelbal minicomputers basic 11 business basic b32 data general data general extended basic southampton basic system wang basic time sharing computers basic plus vsi basic for openvms super basic call 360 basic other alphabasic astro basic basicode bal casio basic cbasic pbasic sds basic tiny basic ubasic zbasic extenders basic 8 simons basic super expander super expander 64 ys megabasic procedure oriented proprietary amigabasic amos basic asic basicx beta basic futurebasic grass liberty basic lse mapbasic mobile basic owbasic powerbasic purebasic smilebasic tiger basic true basic turbo basic wordbasic free and open source basic 256 basic4gl bbc basic v darkbasic indic basic open programming language sdlbasic smallbasic qb64 wxbasic xbasic xblite yabasic with object extensions proprietary autoit chipmunk basic glbasic lotusscript morfik powerbasic vba vbscript vb 5 for microsoft excel 5 0 vsto vsta embedded visual basic free and open source blitzmax freebasic microsoft small basic mono basic openoffice basic visual basic net roslyn rad designers proprietary ca realizer visual basic classic ns basic rapidq visual basic net mercury xojo free and open source b4x basic4android basic4ppc gambas winfbe visual fb editor defunct altair basic applesoft basic apple business basic atari basic atari microsoft basic atari st basic basic a basic xe basic xl basic programming atari 2600 bbc basic benton harbor basic chinese basic commodore basic color basic dartmouth basic disk extended color basic extended color basic family basic gfa basic gw basic ibm basic jr basic macbasic mbasic msx basic ms basic for macintosh qbasic quickbasic s basic sinclair basic stos basic superbasic ti basic ti 99 4a turbo basic xl vilnius basic retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title scelbal 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