On Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 5:43:19 a.m. UTC-4, F. W. wrote:
> Is there a very simple interpreter for BASIC for BASH? 

Given the paucity of useful answers, here are the ones I use:

* Michael Haardt's Bas — http://www.moria.de/~michael/bas/ : command-line
interpreter for a pretty complete implementation of ANSI Full BASIC (the one
with matrix commands, but this one doesn't allow decimal floating point like
the standard expects). 
There's a slightly updated version available if you substitute 2.6 for 2.5 in
the download link.

* Matrix Brandy BASIC VI — http://brandy.matrixnetwork.co.uk/ : a very much
improved BBC BASIC VI interpreter, which is able to compete with the RISC OS
one for speed. The main brandy executable is graphical, but you can build the
tbrandy and sbrandy 
command-line interpreters that work well from the shell.

* Richard Russell's BBC BASIC for SDL has command-line interpreters —
https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl/index.html : Richard has maintained many
versions of BBC BASIC, from BBC BASIC for the Z80 Second Processor to BBC BASIC
for Windows. He was also on 
the language steering committee.

* cbmbasic - Commodore BASIC V2 as a scripting language —
https://github.com/mist64/cbmbasic : this is Commodore 64 basic transpiled into
C, so you're effectively running 6502 instructions very quickly on your
machine. Objectively, it's a fairly 
terrible BASIC interpreter, but you can call scripts with the #! line, if you
must.

There are some other niche BASIC interpreters/compilers:

* freebasic: a compiler that is vaguely inspired by QuickBASIC/Visual BASIC

* PC-BASIC: a very faithful clone of GW-BASIC written in Python

* x11-basic: an interpreter/compiler very much influenced by GFA-BASIC on the
Atari ST and Amiga. The developer's been working on this for about 20 years
pretty much for their own amusement

* Decimal BASIC: this one can be a little hard to compile, and it doesn't help
that most of the docs are in Japanese, but this is a complete (graphical-only)
implementation of ANSI Full BASIC with decimal mathematics. Experience the joy
of numbers 
rounding properly!

Of course, you could always run QBasic in DOSbox for all your GORILLAS.BAS
needs.

 Stewart

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