QBasic, a short form of Quick Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, is an integrated development environment and interpreter for a variety of BASIC programming languages which are based on QuickBASIC. Code entered into the IDE is compiled to an intermediate representation, and this IR is immediately interpreted on demand within the IDE. It can run under nearly all versions of DOS and 32-bit versions of Windows, or through emulation via DOSBox/DOSEMU on Linux, FreeBSD, and 64-bit versions of Windows. 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. It supports various inbuilt functions. 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a concept often associated with BASIC, are supported for compatibility, but are not considered good form, having been replaced by descriptive line labels.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, and several primitive types used to contain strings of text or numeric data.
History
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, descended from OS/2 code, includes 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, but can still be obtained for use on newer versions of Windows. QBasic is backwards-compatible with DOS releases prior to 5.0. 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.
Examples
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. To see it, press and hold:
and simultaneously after running QBasic at the DOS prompt but before the title screen loads: this lists The Team of programmers. On fast modern computers, it is difficult to perform. It is best done on an old PC or in an emulator like Bochs or DOSBox which can be slowed. A screenprint can be seen at .
