Origins of the "array like" strings in BASIC

Question

A number of early microcomputer BASICs had 'array like strings' that were unlike MS's system and instead behaved like arrays of char. Substrings were accessed using a syntax like:

A$ = B$(1,5)

as opposed to the MS style:

A$ = LEFT$(B$,4)

Note the potential off-by-one.

I know that some minicomputer BASICs also worked this way, I believe HP and Nova were the canonical examples. North Star BASIC also used this style, and I suspect, due to its origins, that Cromenco Extended BASIC did as well.

So the question: does anyone know the first microcomputer BASIC that used this style of string notation? And wider, where this style originated?

Answer 1

I think the earliest BASIC dialects on micros to use these constructs for strings were North Star BASIC and Apple Integer BASIC in 1977, both presumably influenced by HP BASIC. The Apple lineage isn’t surprising since Steve Wozniak worked at HP.

The origin of this approach to substring addressing could be FORTRAN, which uses a syntax of the form A(I:L).

Answer 2

Sinclair's Basic used the slicing syntax for string manipulation. It even uses it as lvalue. It is imho very clever as it allows some operations without generating lot of garbage as the Microsoft way does. For example: replacing 2 character in the middle of a string

Sinclair syntax:

 LET A$="123456789"
 LET A$(4 TO 5)="ab"
 PRINT A$

 123ab6789

Microsoft syntax:

 A$="123456789"
 A$=LEFT$(A$,4)+"ab"+MID$(A$,6): REM Only if Basic support 2 parameters MID$
 ?A$

 1234ab789   (but internally 4 temporaries were created "123456789","1234","ab" and "789".

(MS example might be off by 1)

Answer 3

Follow up: following the leads above, and having burrowed into the rabbit hole much deeper than intended, I think it's safe to say the ultimate answer is Integer BASIC.

Woz's dialect is (of course) well documented and directly states it was ported from HP. It dates to early 1976, when he started visiting the Homebrew meetings to demonstrate it. I suppose one could mark its "official" release to July 1976 when the Apple I was first put on sale.

The other early possibility is SCELBAL, which was first detailed in February 1976 and shipped in book form a few months later. However, this initial version did not include string support, and the Strings Supplement which added that code is copyrighted to 1977. I strongly suspect it took it string functions from Integer, not HP directly, although I will check with the author on that one.