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This may seem to be the answer to many prayers: the speed of machine code by writing Basic. But life is never that simple. If it was, we would all be writing chart-toppers.

The problem is that this can only cope with a small subset of Basic keywords. The manual claims it covers 65, but even to do this you must write in a particular way. For example, a MOVE statement must first be translated into VDU statements which may not be easy if you don't usually use this method.

That understood, this is a very compact and fast compiler which does all that is claimed. The manual is well-written although I didn't find the disc instructions very easy to understand. The subset is reasonable and the code you produce can be used without compiler in memory.

The demo program shows another problem, though. The machine code version of the first part is no faster than the Basic one, and the second doesn't even run in Basic as it was written in a special way so that the compiler could make sense of it!

D.C.