1. A brief history of the BASIC programming language and a bit about the inventor of it – John Kemeny

2. The reasons I got into BASIC, the reasons you should too, the positives and benefits of this very old programming language, and more information can be found in this post of mine, just click here

3. Now let’s take a look at the programming environments we’ll be using as we go through the BASIC tutorials on my blog. We need two environments – an installable one that stays on the computer and can be used offline, and an online environment that we can use anywhere and anytime as long as we have an Internet connection.

An installable programming environment: Just BASIC v2.0

Just BASIC is a very cool program that I used for a long time before I even thought I should find an online version. The program is lightweight, free to download and runs on any machine. It installs very quickly, loads super fast and has all the necessary options for a beginner BASIC programmer. You can download Just BASIC from here: https://www.justbasic.com/download.html

There are some known inconveniences that inevitably accompany free software programming environments, and Just BASIC is no exception. Compilation is done via a button in the menu bar, but then, in order to close the screen with the result of the program, we must necessarily click on the X on the top right, not like in other programs that I have used recently. Also, every build opens a brand new window, and if we don’t close them, they stay open forever and overload the machine.

Online programming environment: JDoodle

JDoodle – https://www.jdoodle.com/execute-freebasic-online/

JDoodle is a site that offers services for many programming languages, BASIC being one of them. There is an option to download the file we are writing and there are almost no differences in the syntax that works in Just BASIC and the one that works in JDoodle.

Alternative online programming environment: QuiteBASIC

QuiteBASIC – http://www.quitebasic.com/

QuiteBASIC is not the standard programming environment – it’s like a time machine 🙂 There are some differences between what works on JustBASIC and what works on QuiteBASIC. Also, the online environment, just as it was at the dawn of programming, requires that we prefix each line with a number to indicate the order of compilation. That is, if in normal programs we write:

print "Hello world" 

and that works perfectly, it won’t work on QuiteBASIC and we’ll have to add a number to the front of the line. Back in the 1980s, it was assumed that the first number should always be 10, and each subsequent row should be +10 of the previous one, that is, 10,20,30,40, etc. This allowed code to be added between lines without changing the numbers on all other lines. For example, if I want to add an extra line between 10 and 20, I can put it with any number from 11 to 19. Example:

10 print "hello"
11 print "how are you"
20 print "fine, thanks"

Also, the interface of QuiteBASIC is black, written in green letters (how “hack-ish” haha) and most importantly (which is no longer a joke) – with this online session we can also use the graphic capabilities of BASIC – we can draw with pixels, create different graphs etc.

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If you want to get down to the real BASIC programming, you can visit the first tutorial in the series at this link, just click here.