STOS BASIC

STOS BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language written for the Atari ST home computer. It was designed for making games, and its built-in high-level graphics and sound commands let a programmer produce multimedia software without knowing the internals of the machine. The language was developed by Francois Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulos, who worked under the name Jawx, and it was published by Mandarin Software, later renamed Europress Software. It first appeared in France, and the first British release, version 2.3 in late 1988, shipped with three complete games and a set of sprite and music editors. STOS began as an interpreter; a compiler followed, which required version 2.4, and later releases adapted it to newer TOS versions on the Atari STE. Third-party extensions such as STOS Maestro, TOME and STOS 3D added commands and kept the system in use for years. Critics found it slow and unable to support structured programming. Lionet later released the source code, and his AMOS BASIC for the Amiga followed its design.