I've looked around and found out that literally no one has posted anything about attempts to implement BASIC on the PICO-8, which honestly kinda disappointed me. BASIC is, well, basic, so I would have thought someone would have at least tried to implement it... and now I want to do it.

Thoughts?

I don't have any thoughts on implementing it, but I remember that zep mentioned in the PRACTICE 2018 talk that PICO-8 was originally going to use a BASIC, but in the process of implementing BASIC via compiling into Lua, zep fell in love with Lua itself and decided to lean into that.

So, like, PICO-BASIC would honestly be super in the spirit of PICO-8? But that's my best guess as to why it doesn't already exist: because Lua does what BASIC would have done and more.

To be fair, the Lua thing makes sense. However, PICO-8 is a tool which basically asks to have novelties put onto it. A prime example is ELIZA-8. Does it have any real use? No. But is it cool? Absolutely! I think a BASIC implementation would be something similar. To an extent useless, but awesome nontheless.

Here’s a list of fantasy consoles, many of which use BASIC:

https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy