>>
>>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!:-)
>\

Ah, sweet memories. My first computer was an Atari 400. After I taught myself Atari BASIC (a really nice little 8K ROM based BASIC with real time syntax checking), I went on to 6502 assembly language. The nice thing about the Atari was that there was a published memory map to the ROM BIOS, the complete source code to the ROM BASIC and the disk operating system. I used to read that source code over and over again trying to learn exactly what was going on "under the hood".

For some reason, I've always been more interested in that kind of thing. In fact, I never really want to be an application developer. I wanted to be a systems programmer. I guess it explains my fascination with the Win API.< s >