MICROSOFT PROGRAMMING SOFTWARE CODE AND EXPANDED

Game Stack is the tools and services game developers use from Microsoft to build great games. COM is the basis for several other Microsoft technologies and frameworks, including OLE, OLE Automation, Browser Helper. It is used to enable inter-process communication object creation in a large range of programming languages.

The release of Visual Basic reignited its popularity and it remains in wide use on Microsoft Windows platforms in its most recent incarnation, Visual Basic. Slight variations to add support for machine-specific functions, especially graphics, led to a profusion of related designs like Commodore BASIC and Atari Microsoft BASIC.As the early home computers gave way to newer designs like the IBM Personal Computer and Apple Macintosh, BASIC was no longer as widely used, although it retained a strong following. Microsoft Azure.During the home computer craze during the late-1970s and early-1980s, Microsoft BASIC was ported to and supplied with practically every computer design.

Microsoft Programming Software Code And Expanded

This new 40-bit format became the most common as it was used on most 6502-based machines of the era. The 6502 had somewhat less dense assembler code and expanded in size to just under 8K for the single precision version, or 9K for a version using an intermediate 40-bit floating point format in place of the original 32-bit version. Numeric variables now had three basic types,В % denoted 16-bit integers, # denoted 64-bit doubles, andВ ! denoted 32-bit singles, but this was the default format so theВ ! is rarely seen in programs.The extended 8В KB version was then generalized into BASIC-80 (8080/85, Z80), and ported into BASIC-68 ( 6800), BASIC-69 ( 6809), and 6502-BASIC. Later on, Microsoft released the 12K Extended BASIC, which included double precision 64-bit variables, IF.THEN.ELSE structures, user defined functions, more advanced program editing commands, and descriptive error messages as opposed to error numbers. String variables were denoted with a $ suffix, which remained in later versions of the language.

Hence, Microsoft's and other variants of BASIC constitute a significant and visible part of the user interface of many home computers' rudimentary operating systems.By 1981, Microsoft BASIC was so popular that even companies that already had a BASIC licensed the language, such as IBM for its Personal Computer, and Atari, which sold both Atari Microsoft BASIC and its own Atari BASIC. Contrary to the original Altair BASIC, most home computer BASICs are resident in ROM, and thus are available on the machines at power-on in the form of the characteristic ' READY.' prompt. BASIC 5.x removed the ability to crunch program lines.The core command set and syntax are the same in all implementations of Microsoft BASIC and, generally speaking, a program can be run on any version if it does not use hardware-specific features or double precision numbers (not supported in some implementations).Licenses to home computer makers After the initial success of Altair BASIC, Microsoft BASIC became the basis for a lucrative software licensing business, being ported to the majority of the numerous home and other personal computers of the 1970s and especially the 1980s, and extended along the way.

The company similarly licensed an Applesoft-compatible BASIC to VTech for its Laser 128 clone. After licensing IBM Advanced BASIC (BASICA) to IBM, for example, Microsoft licensed the compatible GW-BASIC to makers of PC clones, and also sold copies to retail customers. How are you going to argue with that?' Microsoft licensed similar versions to companies that competed with each other.

However, due to the popularity of CP/M, the great majority of Z80 machines ran MBASIC, rather than a version customized for specific hardware (TRS-80 BASIC was one of the few exceptions). Also available for TEKDOS.MBASIC is a stripped-down BASIC-80 with only hardware-neutral functions. The adaptation of Microsoft's Extended BASIC-80 was carried out by Marc McDonald in 1976/1977.MBASIC is available for CP/M-80 and ISIS-II.

It was no longer necessary to reserve string space. Thus the ability to crunch program lines (without spaces between keywords and arguments) was no longer possible as it had been in Level II. Level II BASIC contained some of the features of Extended BASIC, although due to the need to include Level I commands such as SET and PSET, other features such as descriptive error messages still had to be left out these were subsequently added into TRS-80 Disk BASIC.The TRS-80 Model 4 had a newer disk-based BASIC that utilized the BASIC-80 5.x core, which included support for 40-character variable names.

It was utilizing an 8-bit FAT file system.Microsoft also offered a version of Standalone BASIC-86 for SBC-86/12 for Intel's 8086 Single Board Computer platform in 1980.This is the version of BASIC used on Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A computer line. The facility available in Level II to sort arrays (CMD'O') was not available programmers and users had to devise their own workarounds.The first implementation as a standalone disk based language system was for Seattle Computer Products S-1 CPU card in 1979. The program edit environment was still line-oriented. A modified version published later by OS provider Logical Systems, in the LS-DOS Version 6.3 update, added single-letter access to BASIC control functions (like LIST and EDIT) and direct access to LS-DOS supervisor calls.

As compensation for not having double precision variables, Microsoft included 40-bit floating point support instead of BASIC-80's 32-bit floating point and string allocation was dynamic (thus the user did not have to reserve string space like in BASIC-80).