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Show HN: I wrote a BASIC interpreter that boots on UEFI machines

(tarjan.itch.io)

This is a great project. How do you handle saving/loading data? You mentioned file operations but you need some sort of file system - perhaps FAT32 - to support that. I'd need that to consider using it on UEFI.

One thing you could use for more test cases is the book 101 BASIC Computers Games by David Ahl. Games always encouraged people to use computers and that's as classic as it gets!

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> How do you handle saving/loading data?

The linked page has this to say:

"Disk I/O — SAVE, LOAD, MERGE, FILES, KILL, running directly on the UEFI Simple File System."

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That's right. It uses UEFI's FAT32.
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Very cool! The raw-metal boot part is impressive.

BASIC requires more support than you'd expect. Here's an interpreter, with a similarly long list of features it has to support:

https://www.moondew.com/basic/index.htm

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Very nice! I am curious how you built your BASIC as an EFI application. I didn't find any source code or build instructions in the downloads.

I am investigating whether it would be feasible to do something similar for Python.

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I learned to program on the Commodore 64 and in QBASIC in th 90's. I'll give it a try.

Considering how much it supports, if it could chainload a full operating system, it would make a great replacement for GRUB or rEFIt.

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That's an interesting idea. :-)
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