QBasic is an integrated development environment (IDE) and interpreter for a variety of dialects of BASIC which are based on QuickBASIC.
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Code entered into the IDE is compiled to an intermediate representation (IR), and this IR is immediately executed on demand within the IDE.
Paradigm | Procedural |
---|---|
Developer | Microsoft |
First appeared | 1991 |
Typing discipline | Static, strong |
OS | MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, PC DOS, OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS |
License | Proprietary |
Influenced by | |
QuickBASIC, GW-BASIC | |
Influenced | |
FreeBASIC, QB64, SmallBasic |
Like QuickBASIC, but unlike earlier versions of Microsoft BASIC, QBasic is a structured programming language, supporting constructs such as subroutines. Line numbers, a concept often associated with BASIC, are supported for compatibility, but are not considered good form, having been replaced by descriptive line labels. QBasic has limited support for user-defined data types (structures), and several primitive types used to contain strings of text or numeric data. It supports various inbuilt functions.
For its time, QBasic provided a state-of-the-art IDE, including a debugger with features such as on-the-fly expression evaluation and code modification.[citation needed]
QBasic was intended as a replacement for GW-BASIC. It was based on the earlier QuickBASIC 4.5 compiler but without QuickBASIC's compiler and linker elements. Version 1.0 was shipped together with MS-DOS 5.0 and higher, as well as Windows 95, Windows NT 3.x, and Windows NT 4.0. IBM recompiled QBasic and included it in PC DOS 5.x, as well as OS/2 2.0 onwards. eComStation and ArcaOS, descended from OS/2 code, include QBasic 1.0. QBasic 1.1 is included with MS-DOS 6.x, and, without EDIT
, in Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. Starting with Windows 2000, Microsoft no longer includes QBasic with their operating systems.
QBasic (as well as the built-in MS-DOS Editor) is backwards-compatible with DOS releases prior to 5.0 (down to at least DOS 3.20). However, if used on any 8088/8086 computers, or on some 80286 computers, the QBasic program may run very slowly, or perhaps not at all, due to DOS memory size limits. Until MS-DOS 7, MS-DOS Editor and Help required QBasic: the EDIT.COM
and HELP.COM
programs simply started QBasic in editor and help mode only, and these can also be entered by running QBASIC.EXE
with the /EDITOR
and /QHELP
switches (i.e., command lines QBASIC /EDITOR
and QBASIC /QHELP
).
QBasic came complete with four pre-written example programs. These were Nibbles, a variant of the Snake game; Gorillas, an artillery game; MONEY MANAGER, a personal finance manager; and RemLine, a Q-BASIC code line-number-removing program.
QBasic has an Easter egg accessed by pressing and holding Left CTRL+Left SHIFT+Left ALT+Right CTRL+Right SHIFT+Right ALT simultaneously after running QBasic at the DOS prompt but before the title screen loads: this lists The Team of programmers.
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