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This is the FOSBIC1 compiler developed at the University of Gießen, Germany
in the late 70s for the CDC 3300 batch system.

It is a BASIC compiler and runtime system which is written in FORTRAN IV.

The text book from which the source code was copied implies that it is
a modified version of a BASIC compiler named UWBIC from the
University of Washington, developed by William Sharp in 1967, for their
IBM 7094.

FOSBIC1 was extended with MAT functions (vector and matrix math) as well
as with a proprietary FILE subsystem which allows to play with simple
sequential an index sequential files.

It was possible to port this code to modern GNU gfortran with few changes,
so this allows to play a bit with a retro system. For serious work it is
surely no longer useful, however modern BASIC does no longer have the
MAT statement which was popular for some of these old implementations.

FOSBIC translates a BASIC program provided as a batch job on punched cards
into an intermediate code and, in case of no errors, submits this code
to an interpreter which then produces output.

On copyrights
-------------

The original code does not contain any classical copyright notice.
It is published work as a textbook for university classes.


The book itself is copyrighted 1977 by the publisher Paul Haupt Verlag
in a university series UTB (Universitäts-Taschen-Bücher) which is
no longer in print.
Wikipedia says about this: The original owner Paul Haupt died in 1978;
the Verlag in Bern (Switzerland) is nowadays named Haupt Verlag AG.
While there is still the series UTB of science books, the catalog no longer
lists the referred book.

The compiler output identifies itself as

                       TESTCOMPILER -- BASIC BWL 5 GIESSEN -- VERSION 6/76-04

        INFORMATIONEN DURCH:

        PROF.DR.OEC.PUBL.K.WEBER,M.S.
        DIPL.-ING.,DIPL.-OEC.C.W.TUERSCHMANN
        PROFESSUR FUER BETRIEBSWIRTSCHAFTSLEHRE V
        LICHER STRASSE 74
        D-6300 GIESSEN
        FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

        ******************************** PROGRAMMKENNUNG *******************************
        *
        ********************************************************************************

        BASIC TEXTBOOK = WEBER, TUERSCHMANN, BASIC LEHR- UND HANDBUCH. BERN 1977. BAND 1 = A
        ****************                                                          BAND 2 = B
                         WEBER, TUERSCHMANN. FOSBIC. BERN 1977.                          = C

                        TESTCOMPILER -- BASIC BWL 5 GIESSEN -- VERSION 6/76-04


The referred department at the still existing Vniversity of Gießen appears to be no longer
existing; also the mentioned professor (Weber) and his assistent (Türschmann) appear to be
retired for long time, or even no longer alive. It was not possible for me, with the exception
of a newspaper article on the FOSBIC system from the University web site
(https://www.uni-giessen.de/de/fbz/svc/hrz/org/historie/Dokumente/FOSBIC.pdf), to find any
further reference or contact to the authors and the system itself.

Thus, in order to preserve the past (and possibly also the lost UWBIC compiler which appears
to have been rather similar to this), I decided to publish this work and make it
available for interested groups, mainly scientists,  in the same sense of the formerly
published textbook which opened the source of this work in 1977.


Directory structure
-------------------

top
 +--- *.for                        the sources
 |    *.c
 |    makefile
 |
 +--- examples
 |     +--- *.bas                  various example files
 |          references.txt         reference to original documentation
 |
 +--- original
       +--- *.for                  unmodified sources as in the PDF
            FOSBIC-Compiler.pdf    Scan of the source book


Running the system
------------------

As a batch system, not interactive as in modern BASIC interpreters, one
passes a written BASIC file through the standard input stream to the
compiler, and get a dump of the result on the standard output stream,
intended to be printed on a line printer.

Thus, it is to be used from a cmd windows as

	C:\FOSBIC> .\fosbic < example\hello.bas

or from a linux bash shell as

	$ ./fosbic < example/hello.bas

As a native FORTRAN program, FOSBIC will emit the typical printer control
commands in the first column, namely blank, zero and plus.
They will be processed by the provided ASA utility by piping the FOSBIC output to
as in

	C:\FOSBIC> .\fosbic < example\hello.bas | .\asa
or
	$ ./fosbic < example/hello.bas | ./asa

Attention: this is real batch processing, i.e. there is an INPUT statement,
but you cannot interactively provide input from the keyboard,
but rather the data to be entered has to be provided as 'punched cards' after
the program, e.g. as in

*
10 PRINT 'ENTER DATA'
20 INPUT A
30 PRINT 'YOU ENTERED',A
40 END

12345
*

The 12345 is the data which is read by INPUT. For experiments, you better use
READ and DATA statements.




Compiling
---------

Building is rather straight forward from Linux - you just need GNU gfortran, a C compiler for asa.c
and the make utility.
Running make in the top level directory with the *.for files will produce two executables
fosbic and asa.

Under Windows, you need a mingw or cygwin environment with gfortran, gcc, and make as well.
Likewise run make, and get a fosbic.exe and asa.exe file.