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This is a notable historical programming language. Power.corrupts (talk) 13:53, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Coding was "free form"

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Over the many years since I had and lugged around the world my KayPro IV I've thought of how absolutely unique S-Basic was as a programming language.   This article has aptly illustrated for me (an ancient and long-time applications programmer) how advanced and ahead of its time S-BASIC was over all the other BASIC languages of the era.  How primitive "Big Gorilla"'s BASIC was in comparison -- his being nothing more than a simple, common, run of the mill interpreter like all the other BASIC interpreters on the market (or freely offered) during that pre-IBM era of what were known as "hobby computers" that you built yourself by soldering discrete components on bare motherboards, assembled,crossed your fingers, and then gave your work the "smoke" or "fuse blowing" test ... and hoped neither would happen.

The problem with S-BASIC, in my estimation, as far as Non-Linear Systems' (a much respected company producing excellent test equipment and instrumentation, now long defunct) as the software bundled with the KayPro series of portable computers is concerned, was the near impossibility of understanding the User Manual that came with the software (in those bygone days all software products came with a hard copy user manual).  Being in the industry, I was able to figure out the S-BASIC manual and use the software, and was absolutely amazed at how standard BASIC scripts (of the time) could be written in "free form", written virtually just like I'm now writing this discussion topic.  Absolutely incredible!  The parser acted only on Dartmouth BASIC command words, and ignored everything else!

Not only did my free form scripts work, and work well, but to my delight they were compiled and an executable .com file (the pre-IBM executable file extension)... no tag-along runtime interpreter required!  No other hobby computer vendors -- Apple, Radio Shack, Altair, Heathkit, et. al. offered anything close to KayPro's S-BASIC.

I believe that it was because the S-BASIC manual was so poorly written and virtually unintelligible that Non-Linear Systems was never able to take advantage of the unique features of the product, nor popularize it.  Understandably, S-BASIC was only one of the half dozen more popular database, text editing, and accounting programs (as well as a 'standard' BASIC interpreter) that were bundled with the KayPro-series computers, so there was no need to spend time or money to tout their S-BASIC program.

S-BASIC was a wonderful and very unique product of its time.  It very definitely was a unique and unappreciated milestone in software history.  Consequently, this article should never have been put up for deletion.

K. Kellogg-Smith (talk) 13:51, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hyphen or no-hyphen?

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S-BASIC seems to have spelled itself with a hyphen. Shouldn't the article reflect this? For evidence, see the ad here and the KayPro documentation here. dweinberger 13:59, 29 March 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dweinberger (talk • contribs)

  • Agreed; article moved, though (unsurprisingly) there are some other similarly-named languages without their own pages that now link here. I confirmed that Kaypro's S-BASIC was written that way through multiple images such as the one linked by User:Dweinberger. Someone with more knowledge of other languages with similar names should probably make a disambiguation page. Recent updates to the BASIC template will now land here, though they reference Sharp/Casio/Tandy calculators, not KAYPRO GeoGreg (talk) 22:14, 9 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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