CapnZapp wrote: ↑Tue Feb 14, 2023 2:33 pm ... If we are going to implement sound and graphics routines anyway...
Why not adhere to the exact syntax of an existing Commodore BASIC, and then market our product as being sort-of BASIC 7 compatible?
Who is "we" here? The design team? Community contributors?
On the question, because the exact syntax may not be the most effective syntax for the Graphics, Audio & Memory Management routines in the X16. The design team putting that additional requirement on community contributions would only discourage community contributions that went for the best design for the purpose.
Obviously you would have to feed the commands different numbers given the different hardware... but there's nostalgic value in being able to write the exact same commands as before, or so I assumed.
The nostalgic value of Basic V7.0 is really low, since given the wide gap between install base, the most common use of Basic 7.0 was to run Basic 2.0 programs over twice as fast.
... I thought it would be obvious that instead of each community member suggesting their take on a given command, resulting in BASIC v2 plus a hodge-podge of more "modern" commands, it would feel more valuable if you actually chose the specific set of commands given by one version of Commodore BASIC, and then backported those commands.
Instead of saying the CX16 supports BASIC 2 plus a huge load of extra commands with no counterpart in Commodore history, you could say the CX16 supported BASIC 3.5 (say) plus a much smaller number of extra commands with no counterpart in Commodore history.
Except it doesn't support Basic 3.5 yet. Given that it's been this many years and nobody has volunteered the upgrades offered by going from Basic 2.0 to Basic 3.5, that suggests that if the design team had made that a design goal, the result would be that the system would still be short of the design goal, even though there has been an extra two or so years to work on the system software due to various chip shortages.
If anybody steps forward and makes those contributions, they can start advertising V2.0 & 3.5 compatibility. And if nobody does, they are still feature complete on Basic wherever they get to before the main release is made.