>
>Funny that you should be this but I just happen to have a IBM BASIC manual (from Microsoft) handy. Here's the description:

"Format: SAVE filespec [,A]
>        SAVE filespec [,P]
>...The A option saves the program is ASCII format. Otherwise, BASIC saves the
>file in a compressed binary (tokenized) format. ASCII files take up more space,...
>
>The P option saves the program in an encoded binary format. This is the
>protection option..."

There was a DOS BASIC from MS (late 80's) that could produce stand-alone executables. It proceeded QuickBASIC (which could do likewise). I think it was called Microsoft Profession BASIC (or some such) and the version numbers went up to 7.0.

I remember the ,A option! I also remember that the source code for COMMAND.COM was included with the operating system documentation. Doze were da daze!:-)
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