Console Mode editions updated to version 0.50

Richard Russell · Post by **Richard Russell** » Wed 24 Sep 2025, 15:53

I have updated the BBC BASIC Console Mode editions (BBCTTY) to version 0.50. These are lightweight implementations of BBC BASIC with no graphics or sound (except the Pico edition, which does have sound) ideal for computations, textual applications and scripting. Changes in this version are as follows:

BASIC Interpreter

In a whole array assignment, removed the restriction that the destination array must be the same type as the source array(s). A conversion to the destination type, including of intermediate results, is performed if necessary.

Added a *FLOAT 32 mode, this extends the formats supported by the | indirection operator, and the PRINT# and INPUT# file I/O statements, to include IEEE 754 single-precision floating-point.

Fixed a bug causing integer multiplication to occasionally return an incorrect result (I think this prevously affected only the MacOS build of BBCTTY).

Changed the Bad program error to be non-fatal and return to immediate mode (for consistency with other versions of BBC BASIC).
Libraries

Added listlib.bbc to partially emulate the functionality of Python lists.

Extended the arbitrary-precision integer arithmetic library bigint.bbc to support integer division, square-root and raise-to-power.
Example programs

Added listdemo.bbc to demonstrate the functionality of the new listlib library.

Added bigdemo.bbc to demonstrate the updated bigint library; it's the Rosetta Code Arbitrary-precision integers (included) task.

The new version can be downloaded from the usual place. The GitHub repository has also been updated.