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Programming in BASIC in the 21st century?
3 years ago
I used to be quite good at programming in GW-BASIC, though virtually no one uses BASIC anymore.
However, I had thought of a little program to figure out the tax liability for lottery winnings in the state of New Jersey. There is no program that runs BASIC natively on a Windows 10 machine. I tried downloading a free BASIC program but it was too limited for what I needed. I did find that you could download GW-BASIC, but it doesn't run on a 64-bit machine. I was scratching my head until I saw a program called DOSBox, which emulates a 16-bit DOS machine from within Windows.
I installed that and copied the program I wrote in Notepad and ran it. I kept getting Syntax errors and I rewrote the program but I was unhappy with how it looked; it wasn't tight enough.
Now I do have a GW-BASIC manual, but that is in storage and I have no easy way to get to it as my truck is out of service. I searched online and found a downloadable manual. With that, I was able to find where my mistakes were and fixed them. Now the program is nice and tight and runs perfectly.
Yes, I know I could do it in a spreadsheet, but that means I would have to learn all functions for that spreadsheet; besides it was fun to program in GW-BASIC again.
Who thought I would be programming in GW-BASIC in 2023. :=3
However, I had thought of a little program to figure out the tax liability for lottery winnings in the state of New Jersey. There is no program that runs BASIC natively on a Windows 10 machine. I tried downloading a free BASIC program but it was too limited for what I needed. I did find that you could download GW-BASIC, but it doesn't run on a 64-bit machine. I was scratching my head until I saw a program called DOSBox, which emulates a 16-bit DOS machine from within Windows.
I installed that and copied the program I wrote in Notepad and ran it. I kept getting Syntax errors and I rewrote the program but I was unhappy with how it looked; it wasn't tight enough.
Now I do have a GW-BASIC manual, but that is in storage and I have no easy way to get to it as my truck is out of service. I searched online and found a downloadable manual. With that, I was able to find where my mistakes were and fixed them. Now the program is nice and tight and runs perfectly.
Yes, I know I could do it in a spreadsheet, but that means I would have to learn all functions for that spreadsheet; besides it was fun to program in GW-BASIC again.
Who thought I would be programming in GW-BASIC in 2023. :=3
i'd honestly throw together a script in powershell or Python if I was going to di a new project for stuff like that now (but then again, those are languages I already know because theya re used commonly now)
I believe GW-BASIC is an upgraded version of M-BASIC, where the "M" stood for Microsoft.
Greetings from another Jersey Lion!