QBASIC86 Progress

      Implementation of QBASIC on the 8086 is progressing rapidly. Hal Royaltey and David Kalish have designed the memory model and parameter passing conventions for the object code. Hal has converted the floating point library, and is filling in the rest of the support routines prior to bulk converting the runtime library. All tools needed for this effort are in hand.

Dan Drake has made a complete audit of the differences between QBASIC and CB80 and has prepared a 10 page summary of differences and tasks required in META, QBASIC pass 1, QP2, and the runtime library to resolve the differences. He is planning to do the conversion of the compiler.

John Walker has ported META to the 8086. The port used the new C compiler we bought. META was changed to generate C instead of assembly language code, and the META library was rewritten in C. As a result, META is now instantly portable to any machine which has C. We may very well use C to write the second pass of QBASIC (QP2) as well (it's currently in QBASIC). If we do it all in C, the port to the 68000 will be a piece of cake as far as the compiler is concerned (since all the 68000's announced seem to have C).

The code structure which has been defined will be the first known totally general 8086 compiler implementation. There will be no limit at all on the size of a program. This should make our compiler very attractive compared to all the others that stick you with 64K data and 64K code total.