Basic parsing difficulties in EndBASIC (2023)

The original BASIC parser in EndBASIC 0.1 was very rudimentary and it stayed pretty much unmodified until the 0.10 release last month. This release brought major changes to the parser to support new features, but it wasn’t easy to implement them. In this post, I want to look into various difficulties that arose implementing certain BASIC constructs in EndBASIC. Overcoming these difficulties was difficult, but it was also fascinating because it gave me a glimpse of the design choices that the original BASIC designers must have faced. Capturing these ah-ha moments in a post is also tricky, but I’ll try anyway.