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Acorn Electron
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===Languages=== A significant selling point for the Electron was its built-in BBC BASIC interpreter, providing a degree of familiarity from the BBC Micro along with a level of compatibility with the earlier machine. However, as had been the case with the BBC Micro, support for other languages was quickly forthcoming, facilitated by the common heritage of the two systems.<ref name="acorn_information_volume_1"/> In addition to the early releases, Forth and Lisp, Acornsoft released the Pascal subset, S-Pascal,<ref name="electronuser198503_pascal">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-06/page/n10/mode/1up | title=Try S-Pascal and get rid of those spaghetti junctions | magazine=Electron User | date=March 1985 | access-date=4 September 2022 | last1=Waddilove | first1=Roland | pages=11β12 }}</ref> on cassette and followed up with an ISO Pascal implementation on ROM cartridge,<ref name="electronuser198501_pascal">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-04/page/n4/mode/1up | title=BBC's Pascal for the Electron | magazine=Electron User | date=January 1985 | access-date=3 September 2022 | pages=5 }}</ref> the latter providing two 16 KB ROMs containing a program editor and a Pascal compiler producing intermediate code that required Pascal run-time routines to be loaded.<ref name="acornuser198412_pascal">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/AcornUser029-Dec84/page/n179/mode/1up | title=Pascal Power | magazine=Acorn User | date=December 1984 | access-date=6 September 2022 | last1=Williams | first1=Simon | pages=176 }}</ref> As a more minimal implementation, S-Pascal made use of the machine's built-in BASIC program editing facilities and provided a compiler generating [[assembly language]] that would then be assembled, generating [[machine code]] for direct execution.<ref name="electronuser198503_pascal"/> ISO Pascal had Oxford Pascal as a direct competitor offering a range of features differentiating it from Acornsoft's product,<ref name="electronuser198503_oxford_pascal">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-06/page/n3/mode/1up | title=Oxford Pascal | magazine=Electron User | date=March 1985 | access-date=6 September 2022 | volume=2 | issue=6 | pages=4 }}</ref> notably a compiler that could produce a stand-alone "relocatable 6502 machine-code file".<ref name="acornuser198507_pascal">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/AcornUser036-Jul85/page/n66/mode/1up | title=Pleasures of Pascal | magazine=Acorn User | date=July 1985 | access-date=23 September 2022 | last1=Williams | first1=Simon | pages=65, 67, 69β70 }}</ref> Acornsoft later released the ISO Pascal Stand Alone Generator product for the BBC Micro and Master series, permitting the generation of executable programs embedding "sections of the interpreter" required by each program, with such executables being subject to various licensing restrictions.<ref name="acorn_app62a">{{cite book | title=A Choice of Programming Languages for the British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System | url=http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochures/Acornsoft_APP62a_AcornsoftLanguages.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochures/Acornsoft_APP62a_AcornsoftLanguages.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live | publisher=Acorn Computers Limited | access-date=29 September 2015}}</ref> Acornsoft Forth, aiming for compliance with the Forth-79 standard, was regarded as "an excellent implementation of the language".<ref name="electronuser198410_forth">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-01/page/n54/mode/1up | title=Open up a whole new world with Forth | magazine=Electron User | date=October 1984 | access-date=6 September 2022 | last1=Waddilove | first1=Roland | pages=55 }}</ref> It saw competition from Skywave Software's Multi-Forth 83 which was delivered on a ROM chip, supported the Forth-83 standard, and provided a multitasking environment.<ref name="electronuser198410_multiforth83">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-01/page/n5/mode/1up | title=Go Forth and multitask! | magazine=Electron User | date=October 1984 | access-date=6 September 2022 | pages=6 }}</ref> Future availability of Multi-Forth 83 on ROM cartridge was advertised.<ref name="electronuser198410_skywave">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-01/page/n19/mode/1up | title=What the Acorn Electron has been waiting for! | magazine=Electron User | date=October 1984 | access-date=6 September 2022 | pages=20 }}</ref> With the launch of the Plus 1, Acornsoft Lisp was also made available on cartridge.<ref name="electronuser198407p1" /> This Lisp implementation provided only the "bare essentials" of a Lisp system that "a small micro such as the Electron" could hope to be able to support. However, with the interpreter and initialised workspace being loaded from cassette into RAM in the earlier release, one stated advantage of the ROM version was the availability of more memory for use by programs, with the immediacy of a Lisp system provided as a language ROM being an implicit benefit.<ref name="electronuser198502_lisp">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume2/Electron-User-02-05/page/n11/mode/1up | title=Lisp, the language that strikes like lightning | magazine=Electron User | date=February 1985 | access-date=4 September 2022 | last1=Waddilove | first1=Roland | pages=12 }}</ref> Acornsoft provided two products offering different degrees of support for the [[Logo (programming language)|Logo programming language]]. Turtle Graphics was a cassette-based product, available alongside Forth, Lisp and S-Pascal amongst the first titles released for the Electron,<ref name="acorn_amp18"/> featuring a subset of Logo focused on the interactive aspects of the language.<ref name="electronuser198710_logo">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume5/Electron-User-05-01/page/n41/mode/2up | title=Turtle graphics | magazine=Electron User | last1=Waddilove | first1=Roland | date=October 1987 | access-date=24 September 2022 | pages=42β43 }}</ref> Acornsoft Logo was provided on ROM cartridge and offered a vocabulary of over 200 commands as part of a more comprehensive implementation of the language, exposing its list processing foundations.<ref name="electronuser198711_logo">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/ElectronUserVolume5/Electron-User-05-02/page/n36/mode/1up | title=Recursion and palindromes | magazine=Electron User | last1=Waddilove | first1=Roland | date=November 1987 | access-date=24 September 2022 | pages=42β43 }}</ref> Turtle Graphics was substantially cheaper than Logo: by 1987, the former had been reportedly discounted to under Β£3 whereas the latter cost "less than Β£30". Unlike other Acornsoft language products, however, Logo was supplied with "two thick manuals".<ref name="electronuser198710_logo"/>
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