QuickBasic Cafe Forum

The Obsolescence of QuickBasic
I'm a computer programmer by trade having been in the consulting business for over ten years. While I'm currently speaking a smattering of mainframe and client/server languages (Cobol, Assembler, ezt, PHP, SqlServer, UNIX Scripting, etc), my heart harkens back to the old QuickBasic language of yesteryear. When I first began dabbling into computers, I learned Basic. By the time I obtained my first copy of QuickBasic 4.5 (mid-90's), this development language was already in decline (from a business perspective).

However, I still loved this simple and quirky little language. I would write simple games for my toddler daughter and work on my epic RPG game. I had originally written this simple NetHack-like RPG game in the early 1990's. It employed all the basic ingredients of Adventure and I worked on various versions of this game for years but never releasing it to the public via Freeware. At one point, I ported and redesigned the game on Visual Basic. While VB has many advanced features and far mor functionality that QB, I found specific aspects of the Windows-development framework quite limiting.

For instance, in QB, I could display a simple multi-colored text line on row one (1) of the screen.

LOCATE 1,2: COLOR 4: PRINT "You are in the Kingdom of ";: COLOR 14: PRINT "Sumeria!"

As far as I know, this is impossible to accomplish with Visual basic. As you may know, VB requires the creation of a text field or object on the form and color is one associated property. I can either made it red, green, blue, etc. but I cannot make the first portion of text one color and the remaining portion of text a different color. I could break the text into two text fields with two separate colors but then spacing becomes an issue with auto-matic resizing of text fields--it becomes messy, doesn't line up properly and its just not as clean.

The other piece of programming ease within QB that is absent in VB is the ability to display any character at a specific coordinate on the screen. That LOCATE command! Within QB, I could create simple two-dimensional tables (rows and columns). Referencing cells within these tables was simple by using the LOCATE command (i.e. LOCATE R%, C%). Not so simple in VB. I had to create one text field for each cell in my table, spend vast amounts of time sizing and aligning them and then I had to create specialized functions/subs for populating data within them. More complicated than QB to be sure.

Recently, I downloaded QB71 and played around with it for a couple of days. Simple and primitive in some ways yet so effective for simple programming tasks. VB has an excellent IDE while QB is... well... cumbersome with an ugly old editing environment. Notepad provides clearer text entry than that ugly old blue screen used by QB. And QB does not support the almost universal CTL-C (cut), CTL-V (paste).

And then there's C. I coded quite a bit in C in the mid to late 1990's. After years of corporate business telling us we shouldn't be developing business applications in 370 Assembler because it was too complicated... too low-level and difficult to maintain--they give us C. The C language is, in fact, an excellent yet unforgiving language. While pointers and low-level memory addressing are fundamental to operating system programming (for which C was originally developed)--it is not necessarily so for basic programming tasks. While the pointers provide power--they also can provide hours of trying to figure out the cause of why some storage got zapped and the ensuing abend. So, insofar as a hobby language, one which I can fluently write code--C is not a candidate.

Today, I work with MS-Excel and VBA. VBA is the visual basic programming  language used by Excel's macros. It's an excellent little extension of QB and VB. It does not, however, contain compiling abilities. That is, I cannot compile the code and make it into an .exe file which I could then distribute (if anyone knows of a way to do this, please let me know).

I am in search of a simple programming language that compiles like QB without the Windows limitations of VB. I've seen PowerBasic but am reluctant to shell out cash for a language I can get for free.

Has anyone tried LibertyBasic? Has anyone tried XBasic? Reviews?

try PureBasic

For Games:
BlitzBasic

LibertyBasic is not good enough.

Though you still should ptog in QB I believe.  Just look at this game I'm making:

Playable Demo:
http://qbhost.com.sapo.pt/FJdemo.zip

Screenshots:
http://auraflow.curvehead.com/projects.htm

Thanks for the response. I'm looking at both products and I'm liking Blitz better. PureBasic editor is very basic indeed. Can't seem to get the debugger working in the Blitz demo, however... And $50USD is a bit steep... Any bootleg copies out there?

Sorry no can do. :*)

But give QB4.5 another chance, you'll still get some kicks out of it.

;*)

Ya, I agree Relsoft, Give Qbasic a chance, that "horrible blue screen", that ive become accustomed to by the way, can be changed, and instead of CTR-C, it is CTR-INS and SHFT-INS, as well as SHFT-DEL for cut. these work in all Microsoft products ive used. WORD, EXCEL, and Visual C++, which i am using in school and still dont understand where they get the "VISUAL" as it really is nothing like VB.

I feel your pain. I have programmed all versions of Basic and have stayed with PDS 7.1 ever since I started using it at work. But I have come to the point that PDS 7.1 can no longer give me what I want. I wanted a compiler that has the flexibility of C and the simplicity of QuickBasic. Alas I have found that compiler. FREEBASIC.

It is a freeware and has most of C's functions (i.e. preprocessors, pointers, inline assembly, etc) as well as most of QuickBasic's reserved words. It is a windows compiler but outputs to DOS screen. It also includes an extensive help file in a CHM format, and a third party visual editor that mimics VisualBasic in terms of automatically converting what you type to upper case for keywords.

Just do a search on "freebasic". Good luck.

I have been using QuickBASIC's Shift+Del to "Cut and store" the highlighted area, and Shift+Ins to "Paste" it back again. And, to avoid having to use the third Ctrl+Ins, I just use the Shift+Del, which "Cuts" the highlighted area AND stores a copy, repaste it with an immediate Shift+Ins, then I go to where I want to "Paste" it, and do a Shift+Ins there, and in as many places I wish to "Paste" it in.

Note that the Copy and Paste words came out with the Windows system, just as a directory became a folder, and so on.

And, as another poster here noted, the Shift+Del and Shift+Ins still work in other MicroSoft more modern programs. I don't know why MS has to invent new methods of doing what we had been doing for years, and that MS still maintains in its new programs (or applications, if you prefer).

Hi there everyone! I wanted to share a view on the QB/PDS subject in here.

I started programming in BASIC compiler 2.0 back in, ah heck who knows.
I was published in PC-Magazine in 1993 (vol. 12#7 MS-Dos 6 preview) for showing how to enable the extended background text colors on any display board at that time (CGA, EGA, VGA) using QuickBasic 4.5 and inreg()/outreg() for detection and processing of the display type.

Over the years since then I've used C/C++/Pascal/VB/VC++, but I also wanted to be able to use a programming environment that was more like the PDS version (maybe with some updates to the interface).

While searching for free compilers (since QB4.5 and PDS 7.1 are in the public domain now) I ran across some alternatives to the QB compilers that work in windows XP, do 32 bit and in the case of one also allow OOP also.

Freebasic is by far one of my top choices for a compatible compiler that works in Windows and performs as well as you'd expect for compiling BASIC code. By allowing the ability to use OOP with your programs I think FreeBasic really opens a lot of doors for the QB/PDS/VBDOS programmers.

I'm not trying to sell, promote or stand behind them, just sharing the info here for everyone.

Rick's reference to Freebasic is good advice BUT keep programming in QB4.5
and compile with Freebasic for 32 bit programs. To me it is QB4.5 with a turbo charger for the things we did not have. Compatibility and other goodies like audio files and loading *.bmp files and then save the *.bmp as *.bsv . (Although Angelo Mottola gave us some terrific routines with his DirectQB QuickLibrary for SCREEN 13 .) It is new life for us QB programmers.
I tried Visual Basic way back and to me it was just a shlep. Convoluted and painful to use someone else's preconceived ideas of what we wanted with no real innovation.

Try PowerBasic's Console Compiler. A true windows compiler with access to API but the look and feel of PowerBasic for DOS and therefore also QuickBasic. Now with a new Graphics screen that makes graphics easy as well as excellent third-party tools. Their support is the best. Take a look at their forum.