BASIC line and command interpretation. This part of the monitor program considers a BASIC line as a set of statements and in its turn each statement as starting with a particular command. For each command there is a 'command routine' and it is the execution of the machine code in the appropriate 'command routine' that effects the 'interpretation'. Expression evaluation The Spectrum has a most comprehensive expression evaluator allowing for a wide range of variable types, functions and operations. Once again this part of the monitor is fairly slow as all the possible alternatives have to be considered. The handling of strings is particularly well managed. All simple strings are managed 'dynamically' and old copies are 'reclaimed' once they are redundant. This means that there is no 'garbage collecting' to be done. The arithmetic routines The Spectrum has two forms for numbers. Integer values in the range -65535 to +65535 are in an 'integral' or 'short' form whilst all other numbers are in a five byte floating point form. The present version of the monitor is unfortunately marred by two mistakes in this part. i. There is a mistake in 'division' whereby the 34th bit of a division is lost. ii. The value of -65536 is sometimes put in 'short' form and at other times in 'floating-point' and this leads to troubles. The floating-point calculator The CALCULATOR of the Spectrum handles numbers and strings and its operations are specified by 'literals'. It can therefore be considered that there is an internal 'stack operating' language in the CALCULATOR. This part of the monitor program contains routines for all the mathematical functions. The approximations to SIN X, EXP X, LN X & ATN X are obtained by developing Chebyshev polynomials and full details are given in the appendix. Overall the 16K monitor program offers an extremely wide range of different BASIC commands and functions. The programmers have always however been short of 'room' and hence the program is written for 'compactness' rather than 'speed'.