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What Ever Happened to QBASIC?
idg101 asks: "I can remember the days when i was 10, programming in QBASIC and checking out all the programs on such sites as this one. There were exciting! Around age 13 i can remember talk of getting an internet interface to work with in your programs. Now, I am 19, and the story has apparently changed. Qbasic.com looks the same as it did many years ago. What happened to QBASIC and its followers?" My guess is that Microsoft has been doing it's best to replace all of the old-school BASIC interpreters with it's Visual Basic...which is all well and good unless all you wanted to do was fiddle with a 10-100 line quickie. So, reiterating idg101's question: are there still lightweight BASIC interpreters still floating around?
The last Qbasic I can remember was on DOS 6.22. IBM bundled REXX with DOS 7. I think it went the way of DOS. A fine program but not enough of a money-maker.
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72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Dude, if you really want, make your own.
The first one should be easy. One chapter in "The Unix Programming Environment" makes an interpreter/compiler for a language almost as powerful as basic, just different.
It would be a great exercise to make your own. You'd learn a lot about compilers and languages. Also, because you maintain it, you have a lot of flexibility in what it does, and how it acts. You'd also, I'm sure, get mad props on slashdot and maybe after you posted about it later, win converts for people who wanted a quick language to do what you want to do.
Qbasic can be downloaded here. It's good to know that even some microsoft software is still free.
You could use vbScript in the windows scripting host, that's basically the same as qbasic, only for windows instead.
Things change. I don't compile to P-Code from Fortran anymore, and code isn't freely shared anymore.
Oh, wait. I guess things don't change...
Get an emulator or abandonware copy, and play with it for awhile - enjoy yourself. Nostalgia in moderate quantities is fun, and it might spark a few new ideas that apply to today's technology.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I may have misunderstood, but I gather if he got an A in that class and the next several classes, he'd progress to Visual Basic.
There are three significant versions of it.
Apart from the BASIC interpertor, you can use it as an editor and as a help engine. The edit.com and help.com automatically launch it in these modes, the files are identical, except at the end, one says EDCOM and the other says QHELP. This is handy, because in Win9x, edit.com does not appear. But if you want to make it, you can do it. You can rename edit.com and help.com to anything you like, eg qbedit.com and help6.com. This might be needed if edit and help commands do something differet, as they do in 4DOS.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
It's not exactly QBASIC but it's still a lot of fun. Currently it runs on PalmOS and Linux.
I would not be too suprised if a Win32 version comes out soon.
I can't say I've done anything useful with it on my Handspring Visor, but it's fun to be able to write little graphics apps.
It does support talking to the com port so it might be useful for interfacing PalmOS supported platforms to other hardware.
http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net
Liberty Basic is sure fun. It lists not being Visual Basic as a virtue!
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
In the Olden Days, before I was knew enough about UNIX, I used to work as a programmer. The first place I worked at, we used Microsoft Basic Development System 7.0.
Imagine QBASIC's bigger, stronger brother. On steroids. I later moved on to use Turbo Pascal (also 7.0, hmmm), and I can tell you, other than OOP there's really nothing PASCAL had on this thing, power-wise.
MSBDS had an amazingly good IDE, had libraries/units/header files (forgot what they're called), no stupid line numbers, you could stick assembly in the BASIC 'code', had libraries that delivered the equivalent of TurboVision (mouse/windows/menubars/etc).
I think all those DOS-mode programming languages died out and were reborn as Windows-based languages. Turbo Pascal is Delphi, QBASIC is Visual Basic, etc.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Put down the Crack Pipe and step away from the p-code compiler......
Check out http://www.powerbasic.com
PowerBasic has its roots as TurboBasic and has advanced light years since then. This isn't your daddy's basic! small and fast compiled code, compairs to optimized c code, faster than c in some functions marginaly slower in others.
Built in networking support in the PBDLL compiler. Put an end to Bloated software use PowerBasic.
It used to be that programmers tried to see what could be done in QBASIC. i can remember seeing a wolfenstein 3d world of some sort. there was also talk of the internet sockets. Anyone know whatever happened to that deal? I think QBASIC is great for begginer to advance programming.. by manuplating memory with peek and poke, you can really accomplish alot.. Even more with the use of DLL's too. I am just wondering what the programmers of today are bringing to teh QBASIC world.. What programs have i missed in the recent years.
You can get around no parameters by using accumulators or registers. These are just ordinary variables that a particular function finds and returns data. If you want to run the function on other variables, you need to move the data around yourself.
Functions can run at different levels. For example, processing an array needs a list function and an item function. One can have different list and item functions.
The trick is to ensure that not more than one function at each level is active at once.
It gets you into the habit of thinking about using a small arena wisely, and about optimising code.
As far as literate programing goes, I use a preprocessor that allows you to strip the basic code out of a text document. That is, one can write a lengthy text document on the subject, and use grep to write the table of contents and the output basic code. Because basic will order the lines as required, you can add and remove functionality by adding and removing chapters of the documentation. This is really interesting to see consequtive lines of a routine come from different chapters of a book... But it makes for tight well documented code. It is just that, like the accumulators, the chief switching routines are also carefully designed to support later insertions.
And one from this, sees why the people who wrote C/C++ wanted to move away from a single arena and single open code base...
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Powerbasic's roots are more complex than that - Yes, Powerbasic has it roots in TurboBasic, but it's a buyback! They wrote it, sold it to Borland, and Borland sold it back
I still do some paying work in Powerbasic, and made my living doing PDS 7.0 for a lot of years, and now do (mostly) VB and SQL server. IMHO, If you want to find a GOOD VB programmer, find one who has programmed back in PDS or TurboBasic/PowerBasic. They seem to understand how the computer WORKS, so they don't write crap
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Not only is it on my NT box, but I have gorilla.bas (which doesn't seem to work).
/.er and this is my first post!
I wonder why they still ship that? Perhaps it's an integral part of the operating system and no MS operating system can run without it.....
Bloody hell - I'm already sounding like a
Our teacher is too lazy (seriously) to teach us anything else, so we use Qbasic.
paul
Was there ever a memory limitation with QB?
I remembered moving off Qbasic/QuickBasic/GWBasic to C+ASM because I wanted to interact with the system resources directly.
Man. I missed those days. When the Internet came around I used to download the ABC packets monthly.
Haven't touched that language for a long while. Never will again I guess, now that I have Linux+Python+SDL.
Well, not really. BUT if you're looking for that good old BASIC so you can write Windows programs, Liberty BASIC is probably your ticket. It has all the appeal of BASIC, and none of the DOS. ;-)
Check it out at http://www.libertybasic.com
-a Liberty BASIC fan