ArabicBASIC

A standalone interpreter for Arabic BASIC. The interpreter is written in Java and is currently available as a JAR file for any platform on which Java can run.

The next release will include a native executable for MacOS. Native executables for additional platforms will be supported as my build pipeline for Windows and Linux comes online.

How to run it

Download

A pre-built JAR file is available in the release directory of this repository. You may simply download it from there. There are also sample ArabicBASIC scripts to run from the subdirectory, release/samples.

Expectations

When you run an ArabicBASIC script in debug mode, you will see a series of notifications and then a print out of the current symbol table. The symbol table will list all the variables processed and their values at the end of the script. Variables are mutable in BASIC, and the sample scripts will demonstrate this.

This current release runs only in Latin-script mode for evaluation purposes only. The next release will likely run only in Arabic-script mode

Requirements to run

Java 11 or higher must be installed on your system.
- Instructions for OpenJDK are here: https://openjdk.java.net/install/
- The java executable must be in your PATH.
- You should know how to use the command line in a terminal application. A good introduction is here: https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/intro_to_command_line/

Sample scripts

In the release/samples directory, you will find several sample scripts for convenience. These are numbered in order of increasing complexity of language features. A comment appears on the first line of each sample script to convey which language features it demonstrates.

Running the scripts on the Command-line

In your favorite terminal, navigate to the where you saved the JAR file, and copy this command:

java -cp ArabicBASIC-0.2.1-alpha.jar com.lisantra.arabicbasic.App -d ./samples/test_01.bas

The -d flag turns on debug mode. This flag is also available as --debug.

To see a list of all modes, not all of which are functional in this ALPHA release, run this command with the -h flag:

java -cp ArabicBASIC-0.2.1-alpha.jar com.lisantra.arabicbasic.App -h