Editing Locomotive BASIC (section)

== Contemporary rivals ==
{{Original research|section|date=July 2019}}

Unlike the [[Commodore 64]]'s built in BASIC ([[Commodore BASIC]]), which had no dedicated commands for graphics or sound, Amstrad BASIC allowed doing pretty much anything that was within the standard capabilities of the machine. This was not unimportant, as some other machines of the era required programmers to use [[Assembly language|assembler]] in order to access the full sound and graphics capabilities of their system. MSX, Sinclair Spectrum and some others offered a similar, more or less complete command set for their sound and graphics capabilities. The only things going clearly beyond BASIC capabilities were the overscan modes used in games and demos, 27-color graphics modes, digital sound playback, and smooth scrolling.

Unlike [[Sinclair BASIC]] or Commodore 64 BASIC, which had various keyboard command shortcuts or specialized keys for choosing symbols or colors, Amstrad BASIC keywords were typed in full and the interpreter [[parsing|parsed]], recognized and [[Lexical analysis#Tokenization|tokenised]] them. However, there were abbreviations like "<code>?</code>" for "<code>PRINT</code>" and a few shortcuts. Programs could be saved onto [[Compact Cassette (data)|Compact Cassette]] or [[floppy disk]] and retrieved as binary or [[ASCII]] files.