NBS Minimal Basic Test Programs, Version 2, User's Manual. Volume I. Documentation

摘要

The publication describes the set of programs developed by NBS for the purpose of testing conformance of implementations of the computer language BASIC to the American National Standard for Minimal Basic, ANSI X3.60-1978. The Department of Commerce has adopted this ANSI standard as Federal Information Processing Standard 68. By submitting the programs to a candidate implementation, the user can test the various features which an implementation must support in order to conform to the standard. While some programs can determine whether or not a given feature is correctly implemented, others produce output which the user must then interpret to some degree. This manual describes how the programs should be used so as to interpret correctly the results of the tests. Such interpretation depends strongly on a solid understanding of the conformance rules laid down in the standard, and there is a brief discussion of these rules and how they relate to the test programs and to the various ways in which the language may be implemented.