SmallBASIC Guide

What it could be good to know.

ANSI The American National Standards Institute. This organization produces many standards, among them the standards for the C and C++ programming languages. See also "ISO".
Program An program consists of a series of commands, statements, and expressions. The program executed by an interpreted language command by command until it ends.
Script Another name for an program. ...
Bit Short for "Binary Digit". All values in computer memory ultimately reduce to binary digits: values that are either zero or one. Computers are often defined by how many bits they use to represent integer values. Typical systems are 32-bit systems, but 64-bit systems are becoming increasingly popular, and 16-bit systems are waning in popularity.
Character Set The set of numeric codes used by a computer system to represent the characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) of a particular country or place. The most common character set in use today is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Many European countries use an extension of ASCII known as ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin-1).
Compiler A program that translates human-readable source code into machine-executable object code. The object code is then executed directly by the computer or by a virtual-machine. See also "Interpreter".
Deadlock The situation in which two communicating processes are each waiting for the other to perform an action.
Environment Variables A collection of strings, of the form name=val, that each program has available to it. Users generally place values into the environment in order to provide information to various programs. Typical examples are the environment variables HOME and PATH.
Escape Sequences A special sequence of characters used for describing non-printing characters, such as \n for newline or \033 for the ASCII ESC (Escape) character.
Flag A variable whose truth value indicates the existence or non-existence of some condition.
Free Software Foundation
FSF A non-profit organization dedicated to the production and distribution of freely distributable software. It was founded by Richard M.@: Stallman.
GNU General Public License
GNU GPL This document describes the terms under which binary library archives or shared objects, and their source code may be distributed. With few words, GPL allows source code and binary forms to be used copied and modified freely.
GMT "Greenwich Mean Time". It is the time of day used as the epoch for Unix and POSIX systems.
GNU "GNU's not Unix". An on-going project of the Free Software Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable, POSIX-compliant computing environment.
GNU/Linux A variant of the GNU system using the Linux kernel, instead of the Free Software Foundation's Hurd kernel. Linux is a stable, efficient, full-featured clone of Unix that has been ported to a variety of architectures. It is most popular on PC-class systems, but runs well on a variety of other systems too. The Linux kernel source code is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, which is perhaps its most important aspect.
Hexadecimal Base 16 notation, where the digits are 0--9 and A--F, with A representing 10, B representing 11, and so on, up to F for 15. Hexadecimal numbers are written in SB using a leading 0x or &H, to indicate their base. Thus, 0x12 is 18 (1 times 16 plus 2).
I/O Abbreviation for "Input/Output", the act of moving data into and/or out of a running program.
Interpreter A program that reads and executes human-readable source code directly. It uses the instructions in it to process data and produce results.
ISO The International Standards Organization. This organization produces international standards for many things, including programming languages, such as C and C++.
Lesser General Public License
LGPL This document describes the terms under which binary library archives or shared objects, and their source code may be distributed.
Octal Base-eight notation, where the digits are 0--7. Octal numbers are written in SB using a leading &o, to indicate their base. Thus, &o13 is 11 (one times 8 plus 3).
POSIX The name for a series of standards that specify a Portable Operating System interface. The "IX" denotes the Unix heritage of these standards.
Private Variables and/or functions that are meant for use exclusively by this level of functions and not for the main program. See LOCAL, "Nested Functions".
Recursion When a function calls itself, either directly or indirectly.
Redirection Redirection means performing input from something other than the standard input stream, or performing output to something other than the standard output stream. In *nix, you can redirect the output of the print statements to a file or a system command, using the >, >>, |, and |& operators. You can redirect input to the INPUT statement using the <, |, and |& operators.
RegExp
Regulat Expression Short for regular expression. A regexp is a pattern that denotes a set of strings, possibly an infinite set. For example, the regexp R.*xp matches any string starting with the letter R and ending with the letters xp.
Search Path In SB, a list of directories to search for SB program files. In the shell, a list of directories to search for executable programs.
Seed The initial value, or starting point, for a sequence of random numbers.
Shell The command interpreter for Unix, POSIX-compliant systems, DOS and WinNT/2K/XP (CMD). The shell works both interactively, and as a programming language for batch files, or shell scripts.
Unix A computer operating system originally developed in the early 1970's at AT&T Bell Laboratories. It initially became popular in universities around the world and later moved into commercial environments as a software development system and network server system. There are many commercial versions of Unix, as well as several work-alike systems whose source code is freely available (such as GNU/Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD).