Nascom News­let­ter

Pascal

B & L have made further improvements to their Pascal disc extensions and, by all reports, this is now a very good package and substantially better than my own, rather crude, Pas-Dos package. As I am not personally a great fan of Pascal (no reflection on our Pascal or B & L’s extensions!) I still have not got round to trying it but, if you are into Pascal, it would be well worth looking at. We will try to obtain the latest copy so that those of you attending the exhibition can give it a try if you want to.

Extended Basic

The new BASIC is now available for tape users. The version for Nas-Dos users, with disc support commands, should be available in a few weeks time. If in the meantime you want to try the tape version, we will offer an upgrade service, for a modest charge, to allow you ta change the tape version for the Nas-Dos version when it is available. Incidently, a translation program is provided to allow ROM BASIC tapes to be converted to XBASIC format.

We will give more details of the features of the Nas-Dos versions and some thoughts on memory usage, in the next issue of Nas-Dos News.

Polysys 4

For those users continuing to use the ROM BASIC we have adapted PolySys 4 to provide many useful additional features. Thee include:

Renumber
Delete
Pack (remove spaces and REMs)
Trace
Printer support

We have chosen this package as being, in our view, the best of the 2K aids to programming in BASIC which is available. In operation it adjusts the input and output tables, which disables Nas-Dos keyboard commands. In practice this is not a problem. All you need to do is to “]L” your program in the usual way, ]E:Polysys and type Z to warm start BASIC with the additional commands active. When you have finished using the additional commands, you juSt press RESET to restore Nas-Dos.

An invaluable aid to program development in BASIC, and one which I use extensively during preparation of programs in ROM BASIC.

PolySys 4 is available now in tape form (all alternatively EPROM for the non-disc user) and we suggest you see a demonstration.