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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 16 2012 @ 12:05 AM EDT |
| Nearly every 1980s computer hobbyist was familiar with a BASIC dialect. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 16 2012 @ 05:08 AM EDT |
QBASIC was a pretty useful tool. Specially with its ability to do interrupt
calls, one could write fancy applications with graphic rendering, sound and even
use other hardware as long as there were properly documented interrupt calls.
I personally wrote a number of useful applications with it. Like a graphical
application launcher, configuration management tool (specially useful for
applications with too many configuration options, and later Win3.x), fancy
graphical chart generator/printer, simple games ... etc. Also wrote a bunch of
junk apps that help me learn more about DOS and PC hardware (graphic systems,
keyboard controllers, mouse, serial ports, parallel ports, printers ... etc).
Of course there were better languages that were available, but I was either not
aware of them or had no access to them for various reasons (mostly because I
couldn't afford them :p). QBASIC was much better than what many people gave it
credit. With subroutines, functions, data types, many useful built-in functions,
it was unlike the line number oriented early BASIC implementations.
It help me get started to learn programming with subroutines/functions, string
manipulation, floating point calculations (learn their limits) and the above
mentioned interrupt calls. It would have been nice if QBASIC had better data
structures support. Wasted a lot of time trying to write more complex
applications without advance data structures. I just wasn't good enough XD.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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