| Developer | Dan Lewis and Frank Bracher, Tymshare |
|---|---|
| First appeared | 1968 |
| Influenced by | |
| Dartmouth BASIC, JOSS, CAL | |
| Influenced | |
| BASIC-PLUS | |
SUPER BASIC, sometimes SBASIC for short, is an advanced dialect of the BASIC programming language offered on Tymshare's SDS 940 systems starting in 1968 and available well into the 1970s.
Like the Dartmouth BASIC it was based on, SUPER BASIC was a compile and go language, as opposed to an interpreter. In addition to offering most of the commands and functions from Dartmouth BASIC Version 4, in including matrix math commands, SUPER BASIC also included a number of features from the seminal JOSS language developed at Rand Corporation,[1] via Tymshare's version, CAL, and added a variety of new functions, complex numbers as a built-in type, and double precision support.
SUPER BASIC also greatly improved string handling over the rudimentary system in Dartmouth, introducing the LEFT, MID and RIGHT string functions, simple string concatenation and other features. These were later used in DEC's BASIC-PLUS, which was later used as the basis for the original Microsoft BASIC that saw widespread use in the 1980s.