Eniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Jan 6, 2023

one of the reasons qbasic was so successful was because it came preinstalled on your OS and it came with everything. input, text, graphics, sound, even "music" through the PLAY command, even a built in help catalogue detailing how it all worked

the only way to get that same experience today is to use a fantasy console

Show threadEniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Jan 6, 2023
the other reason qbasic was likely so popular was that it avoids the billion dollar mistake: it did not have null as a concept. everything was a value or treated like a value, and for non-value types the default was simply empty (a string of size 0, an array with 0 records)
Show threadLaurence GonsalvesJan 6, 2023

@eniko Does qbasic have pointers?

I'm more familiar with the Commodore 8-bit BASICs (which were also MS BASICs), and they had no pointers. Only floats, strings, ints, and arrays of any of those types. Storing stuff in memory directly (ie: via peeks and pokes) wasn't unheard of.

Show threadEniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)
@xenomachina nope, no pointers at all. which made stuff like implementing a stack very annoying
Jan 6, 2023 at 6:08pmWeb