For years, the development of PICO-8 cartridges has been restricted to those elite few who have knowledge of the arcane "Lua" programming language. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to inform you that this is no longer the case! This PICO-8 cartridge contains within it an Integrated Development Environment for a language that anyone can learn. When the language first appeared as P'' in 1964, it lacked the necessary i/o routines to become popular; but thanks to some recent extensions to the language (as well as a little re-branding) it has become instantly recognisable to programmers all over the world. The language has just eight simple commands that anyone can learn in a matter of minutes -- soon, you too could be writing software for the PICO-8!
A very basic IDE for Urban Müller's famous esoteric language.
A few implementation quirks:
- The "," command takes input from a pre-defined input string (listed as "data" in the IDE).
- The cartridge uses an external cartridge called "bfsave.p8" to save and load data. Only one set of data can be saved at a time.
- The BF virtual machine uses the PICO-8's native number type for its memory cells (not bytes).
- The BF virtual machine has memory that extends in both directions from the pointer's starting position.
When editing code or input data, characters can only be appended to the end of the text, not inserted. (It's a horrible way to do things, but then again, so is BF.) Use the D-pad to choose a character and Z to select it. Use X to delete the last character of the text. Use "line" for a newline character, and "space" for a space character. "Clear" requires two Z presses and erases all text. Use "finish" to return to the main menu when you're done.
When running a program, the X button causes an interrupt. After a program finishes running, or is interrupted, press any button to return to the main menu.
When saving, code data is saved to bfsave.p8 at location 0x0000 and input data is saved at location 0x4000, but each has a maximum length of 7167 characters due to the loading mechanism of the IDE. Loading from an empty cartridge will cause a crash.
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