CESILSharp
CESILSharp is a C# re-implementation of an old utility for teaching programming to school kids in the early 1980s. CESIL is the Computer Education In Schools Instruction Language, and is very similar in many ways to Assembly language, but stops short of much of the complexity.
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I was at an Expo a few years ago and saw a tape with ZX-CESIL on it, and typewritten covers. I saw that it was made by Tim Gilbers, who I've had the good fortune to meet on a couple of occasions when demoing the ZX Spectrum Next. I sent him a photo of my find, and he kindly sent me back the instruction manual as a PDF. I found that coding in CESIL was fun, and I could see how it would be a useful aid for teaching basic assembler back in the early 1980s. Nowadays we tend to live in a post-Assembly world, but I liked the implementaion of ZX-CESIL, so I wrote this simple version of it in C Sharp.
It doesn't do everything that ZX-CESIL could, as it only implements the live editor, and not the "R" mode editor, so you have to be a bit careful about how you write your code (very 1980s!). But if you fancy a blast from the past, you can experience all the thrills and spills of ZX-CESIL without the need for a Speccy or loading up an emulator :)
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Instructions
- Download the ZIP file below
- Open the ZIP and copy the contents into a folder somewhere.
- Open the CESILSharp.exe file
- Start coding.
- See the included PDF file for a full language description.
Get it here:
*NOTE: The 7z contains the full manual for ZX-CESIL, which was used as the template for making CESILSharp. The program will nees the ZXSpectrum-7.ttf font in order to render a screen that looks like a speccy.
