qbasic

[abdullahseba]

is qbasic & quickbasic the same

[128er]

Wikipedia says - No ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic

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

[noah_fakelastnamelike_bob]

hi uh for all i know from my books about programing. no i have no clue never looked into it just remember reading it.

[Zero999]

Why are you interested? It's obsolete. There are much better programming languages available now.

You can't run it natively on modern Windows versions, unless you use an emulator such as DOSBox or virtual box.

[T3sl4co1l]

Geez, I used to write that, back when all I had was an 8086 machine!

I still have the, 500k or so of plaintext .BAS floating around I think.

Tim

[G0HZU]

I still (regularly) use a suite of RF design tools I initially wrote in BASIC and then used MS QuickBasic to allow me to convert/use them as an exe on a DOS machine when I bought my first PC in 1990.

I run them in a DOS box and they help with things like impedance matching, synthesiser design, filter design etc etc.

[FrankenPC]

I still (regularly) use a suite of RF design tools I initially wrote in BASIC and then used MS QuickBasic to allow me to convert/use them as an exe on a DOS machine when I bought my first PC in 1990.

I run them in a DOS box and they help with things like impedance matching, synthesiser design, filter design etc etc.

Have you checked this out?  QB64:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64

[KerryW]

Qbasic is an interpreter, QuickBasic is a compiler.

[GK]

This brings back memories. Every time the teacher walked out of the room.............

[Zero999]

Qbasic is an interpreter, QuickBasic is a compiler.

QuickBasic was both a compiler and interpreter.

From what I remember the code generation was horrible, with a compiled EXE not running that much faster than the interpreter.

[EEVblog]

From what I remember the code generation was horrible, with a compiled EXE not running that much faster than the interpreter.

Wrong.
QuickBasic 4.5 produced excellent speed compiled code, quite competitive with the Borland & Microsoft C and Pascal compilers of the day for most general uses, in some instances even faster.
Nobody used Quickbasic as an interpreter. It had an interpreter command line built in, but it's only use was some immediate debugging.
IIRC you could get a library for QB4.5 called PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) that replaced some of the built-in libraries for faster more speed optimised versions.
BASIC PDS 7.1 (QB4.5 was the cut down version without the professional multitasking features) produced faster executable than the competing C and Pascal compilers of the day.
I know because I benchmarked these things at the time and continually shot down many a myth that QuickBasic produced slow code.

[T3sl4co1l]

Wow, C and Pascal must've been horrid.  I've traced function calls in QB before -- woe unto you if you accidentally perform floating point calculations, it does something like eight FAR CALLs and 20 floating point instructions for a single operation.  And each instruction took 200-500 clock cycles, and that's if you had a math co (8087).

Tim

[Zero999]

Have you checked this out?  QB64:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64

QB64 does look good. I've dabbled a bit with FreeBASIC which is only partly QB compatible.

Wow, C and Pascal must've been horrid.  I've traced function calls in QB before -- woe unto you if you accidentally perform floating point calculations, it does something like eight FAR CALLs and 20 floating point instructions for a single operation.  And each instruction took 200-500 clock cycles, and that's if you had a math co (8087).

Tim

I agree, that's why loads of QB programmers use MS-DOS debug assembler to put binary code into their programs when they need a bit more speed. Remember call absolute?

[T3sl4co1l]

I agree, that's why loads of QB programmers use MS-DOS debug assembler to put binary code into their programs when they need a bit more speed. Remember call absolute?

Remember?  I was beast at ABSOLUTE. I remember the ~33 byte mouse routine (INT33 with register-to-stack wrapper).  Also made my own, I think... though I don't remember what I changed, if anything.  Also a keyboard interrupt for maintained keypresses.  Better pray your program doesn't get an interpreter error in the middle!  Made my own routines for certain graphics functions -- I wrote a raycaster engine (think Wolfenstein 3D ca. 1992) which ran, IIRC, about 20 FPS with SINGLEs, 35 FPS with INTEGERs (fixed point), and a comfortable 60 FPS+ with the assembly routines (also fixed point).

I also later ported much of it to assembly (since I didn't bother with memory allocation, it was a 200kB executable, about 8k of which was code -- from a ~30k commented .asm file!), which ran only a measly 400 FPS on my 1GHz processor at the time.

The assembly version (with a byte-per-pixel to EGA converter routine) took about ten seconds per frame on my 8086 computer. (Oh and yes, that machine has proper 128k EGA w00t! )

That, and a few other projects, made an interesting spring.  Wanna say it was 2007 or so.  Taught myself x86 for reals (I had merely dabbled -- DEBUG and such -- before then), fairly fluent in about two months.  That was also before I had any "qualified" learning (my first class on that was AVR assembly the following year).

Tim

[digsys]

I wrote a lot of code in all those flavours, and still use many of the proggies today. Spent a fortune on 3rd party add-on
machine code libraries, often even writing my own in MASM. A lot of the code "talked" directly to hardware, awesome speeds.
Then, I migrated to VB6 and still prefer it over the NET crap.

[abdullahseba]

Why are you interested? It's obsolete. There are much better programming languages available now.

You can't run it natively on modern Windows versions, unless you use an emulator such as DOSBox or virtual box.

it is easy to program the parallel port using qbasic & I am not much good at programing