Chinese BASIC


Chinese BASIC is the name given to several Chinese-localized versions of the BASIC programming language in the early 1980s.

Versions

At least two versions of Chinese BASIC were modified Applesoft BASIC that accepted Chinese commands and variables. They were built into some Taiwan-made Apple II clones. One of these was shipped with the best-selling Multitech Microprofessor II. Another version was shipped with MiTAC's Little Intelligent Computer.
In addition to Apple II clones, Multitech also developed a Zilog Z80-based port of the Chinese BASIC for its own line of high-end computers.

Example

In a typical Chinese BASIC environment, Chinese and English commands are interchangeable. It may also accept Chinese and Latin alphabet variables. For example, you may use in line 50, in line 200 and in line 250. They all do the same thing—to print out the value of on screen.
Chinese BASIC
commands are printed in 		Applesoft BASIC

This program calculates the sum of. The Chinese characters used as variables are the 24 radicals of the Cangjie method, one of the earliest QWERTY keyboard-compatible Chinese input methods. The author of the example program may have been Chu Bong-Foo, the inventor of the Cangjie method and one of the founding fathers of modern Chinese computing.
The significant length of an Applesoft BASIC variable name is restricted to two bytes. Therefore, the variables and are treated as the same. In Multitech's Chinese BASIC, a variable can be 3 bytes long.