Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

Re:Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code by unfocussed_mike on Monday March 07, 2022 @01:28PM (#30591460)

Oh I just mean, QBasic was the language I used for that project.

I can't actually remember it in detail now, but this was when I was 15 or 16. It was a database application; I guess mine would have been music lending.

I wonder if I still have the code. I definitely still wish I had the book.

I really enjoyed QBASIC because of the gentle way you were exposed to better programming practices; I've always admired that.

Five or six years later, my uni project was a BASIC-to-C transpiler for a simple dialect of BASIC as a teaching language with some specific language extensions for message-passing parallel programming. It had a simple IDE, too.

In some ways it is a shame BASIC itself is really gone; modern implementations only have a whisper of its original simplicity.

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Re:Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code by pjmlp on Monday March 07, 2022 @05:06PM (#30593957)

Python seems to have taken its place, specially with all school calculators having some variant of MicroPython.

It isn't the same thing though.

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Re:Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code by unfocussed_mike on Monday March 07, 2022 @06:41PM (#30594804)

Yes -- I think sort of the most basic BASIC programming is done with Scratch, and then they graduate to Python.

In the UK I gather kids are taught Scratch and Python in an overlapping fashion, so they see the structure on the Scratch view and then have a better chance of understanding how the code works without being thrown off by the symbols.

This is probably better in a pedagogical sense, and I am sure Scratch programmers have a better early understanding of flow control and things like loop termination conditions than BASIC programmers did; Scratch makes it more physical.

But it does lose that absolute immediacy of being able to type simple words onto an empty screen and see it do things.

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Re:Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code by zozbot234 on Monday March 07, 2022 @08:53PM (#30595622)

Scratch and especially Python are a lot more complex than BASIC. OTOH, Scratch having a structural rather than solely text-based interface might also make a more complex language immediately usable, by removing the difficulty associated with keywords and surface syntax. This is the kind of thing that would really benefit from a well-designed usability experiment.

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