ASIC programming language

ASIC is a compiler and integrated development environment for a subset of the BASIC programming language. It was released for MS-DOS and compatible systems as shareware. Written by Dave Visti of 80/20 Software, it was one of the few BASIC compilers legally available for download from BBSes. ASIC allows compiling to an EXE or COM file. A COM file for Hello world program is 360 bytes.

ASIC has little or no support for logical operators, control structures, and floating-point arithmetic. These shortcomings resulted in the tongue-in-cheek motto, "ASIC: It's almost BASIC!"

Features
ASIC is strongly impoverished in comparison with its contemporary BASICs. The features of ASIC are selected to make a program be easily and directly compiled into machine language. Thus, many language constructs of ASIC are equivalent to constructs of assembly language.

Program elements
Neither indetifiers, nor keywords are case-sensitive.

Any  statements, if specified, must precede all other statements except   statements or blank lines.

All  statements must be placed at the beginning of the program, before all other statement types, except ,   statements, or blank lines).

Expressions
ASIC does not have the exponentiation operator.

ASIC does not have boolean operators (, ,   etc.).

Arrays
The size of array specified in the  statement must be a literal constant. A single  allows to declare only one array.

Input and Output
's arguments must be a literal or variable. does not allow to use combined expressions as its arguments, nor does it allow to use strings concatenated with  or.

If a  command ends with   or , then the next   command will resume in the position where this one left off, just as though its argument were appended to the argument of the current   command.

The  statement prints integer values six characters wide. They are aligned to the right (no trailing spaces).


 * : Moves the text cursor to the position, where 0 ≤  and 0 ≤  . The position (0, 0) is the upper left corner.

Graphics

 * : Turns on the pixel of the color  at position, where 0 ≤  and 0 ≤  . The position (0, 0) is the upper left corner.

Control Structures
A boolean condition may be only a comparison of numbers or strings, but not a comparison of combined expressions. A literal cannot be the left operand of comparison (e.g. can be, not  ).

Decisions
After, there may be a sequence of statements delimited by   or. An example: Contrary to other BASICs, statements cannot be put between  and the end of the line.

An if-statement can realize the conditional jump. In this case, after  there may be a label.

Looping
In, after   there may be only a number - literal or variable - but not a combined expression. The  clause does not exist in ASIC.

Branching
In a  statement, the label must be followed by a colon.

Subroutines
In a  statement, the label must be followed by a colon.

BAS2ASI
This utility, serving to convert GW-BASIC programs to ASIC syntax, in the version 5.0 does not support some GW-BASIC features. Examples:

in the for loop is not converted. The program is converted into

The exponentiation operator  is not converted. The program is converted into