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Microsoft re-released Basic as Small Basic (with Turtle?!)

barythrin

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Well this is one of the more interesting things I've accidentally found recently. Small Basic for new beginning programmers. Seems to be a free IDE in basic like syntax (well, really it's Visual Basic/cscript like syntax). Quite odd. However their intro to small basic is quite intuitive and has all the examples a beginning programmer would likely try including simple graphic functions. This intrigues me although if one already knew other languages I don't see a huge reason to port anything over nor have I seen if it has the ability to compile things but still I did find that 64-bit Windows 7 officially has no support for 16-bit apps which is annoying, hence little things I wrote in QB I can't run anymore and am forced to rewrite in another language or scripting language. For now I settled on the windows scripting (cscript) language since it's already native on NT and higher operating systems including our servers.

But kinda cool to see Logo/Turtle back for new Windows and a free language again. I stumbled onto this trying to recall if Microsoft officially released Qbasic/Quick Basic as freeware which I thought it had but all I found was a link to "olddos" for Windows 95 which I guess included it.
 
Yeah, I tried it years back and last thing I tried was some QB64 or an attempt at 64-bit qbasic but it wasn't what I wanted as it runs in it's own shell and has dependencies to run. Really the PITA was I couldn't copy/paste the text output and didn't feel like writing it to a file and opening that each time. But yeah I just figured move away from basic but I liked having independent compiled code. I started to rewrite some stuff in C but again I was looking for something compatible and across 16/32/64bit just so I didn't get caught in that issue again. Of course I'm sure they'll replace cscript with powershell or something but still in the mean time it works and is native for anything NT->2008 server, can access WMI resources, etc.

On a side and non-vintage note Microsoft also has been releasing "Express" editions of products like SQL Server, and Visual C/Basic/.Net/Studio which are great for learning current languages as well. Not that I'm a complete MS shop but I still like that I can tinker with VB or such again without using my old copies/licenses.
 
Have you seen FreeBasic? It's Win32-native and includes a QuickBasic compatibility mode that's pretty decent (unless you get into direct hardware manipulation.)

Yeah, I tried it years back and last thing I tried was some QB64 or an attempt at 64-bit qbasic but it wasn't what I wanted as it runs in it's own shell and has dependencies to run. Really the PITA was I couldn't copy/paste the text output and didn't feel like writing it to a file and opening that each time. But yeah I just figured move away from basic but I liked having independent compiled code. I started to rewrite some stuff in C but again I was looking for something compatible and across 16/32/64bit just so I didn't get caught in that issue again. Of course I'm sure they'll replace cscript with powershell or something but still in the mean time it works and is native for anything NT->2008 server, can access WMI resources, etc.

On a side and non-vintage note Microsoft also has been releasing "Express" editions of products like SQL Server, and Visual C/Basic/.Net/Studio which are great for learning current languages as well. Not that I'm a complete MS shop but I still like that I can tinker with VB or such again without using my old copies/licenses.

FreeBASIC is awesome, imo. even the speed of the code it's compiler outputs is very good. QB64 on the other hand, is crap. terrible program. at least i think so.
 
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