Compatibility Step 5

One tricky difference between QuiteBASIC and the real old classic BASIC dialects were that QuiteBASIC were only allowing brackets to enclose array indices, like so: A[5].

As of today, QuiteBASIC will also allow parentheses like this: A(5).

This was one of the big remaining incompatibilities. The few most important remaining issues are multidimensional arrays and the (ugly) "ON" command.

I keep track of incompatibilities on this page in the club house.

Compatibility Step 4

Another step towards compatibility with "real" classic BASIC: as of today, the colon terminator works in Quite BASIC! So now you can do things like:
10 LET A = 17 : LET B = 4711
Myeah, I know... Pretty "basic" stuff, but still.

Cool use of a Quite BASIC gadget

Lewis Palmer on his site about "Volcanos in the making" has written some pretty cool Quite BASIC programs to create animations. The Quite BASIC programs are published on his site as Google Gadgets.

Update: The pages are no longer online. It was fun as long as it lasted though.

Check it out at:
http://scienceperiod2.spruz.com/
Each of the three sections: Subduction zones, Divergent Boundaries, and Hot Spots have an animation powered by a Quite BASIC gadget.

Compatibility Step 3

Good news!
DATA/READ is now part of the Quite BASIC language.

The bad news is that I identified a few more incompatibilities with classic BASIC.

• Array indices; Quite BASIC uses [] but classic BASIC uses ().
• The DEF keyword. Quite BASIC does not support this.

I am tracking all this loosely in a doc at the club house.

Compatibility Step 2

Today I deployed an update to the interpreter with two fixes for incomptibilities.

1. Variables. You are no longer limited to single letter variable names. Yay! As of today Quite BASIC variables are composed by a letter optionally followed by digits. Also, dollar sign is now allowed to be appended. Quite BASIC variables are not typed, so the dollar sign has no menaing, but is is allowed for backwards compatibility. Example variable names: A, A1, A47, A$, A5$.
2. Shortcut for GOTO commands in conditionals. As of today, there is no need to type the GOTO keyword for a simple jump in an IF command. Example: "IF A=B THEN 200 ELSE 300".

I updated the doc at Club Quite BASIC to reflect these fixes.

Next up are DATA/READ commands and the semicolon delimiter. If you have feedback on which incompatibilities are more important, feel free to drop a message at feedback@quitebasic.com or in the comments here.

Compatibility Step 1

Quite BASIC has the look of classic BASIC and most of the good old commands and functions are supported, but there are still some compatibility issues.

So, I have started to track the issues and I am going to start fixing incompatibilities as fast as my time permits. I wrote down a few known issues in a doc over at Club Quite BASIC.

Today I deployed fixes for two annoyances. As of today, the DIM command works. You can still only declare one-dimensional arrays but still... Also, semicolon now works as it should in PRINT statements. So now you can use semicolon to join multiple expressions in your PRINT commands.

Club Quite BASIC

Today we opened the doors to the clubhouse.

club.quitebasic.com is a place for classic BASIC programmers to publish their programs. Users create a user profile and add their own programs to the site.

Programs are wrapped in a "Project" that includes some meta information including the author, a short description of the program, and what canvas resolution to use.

Anyone can browse the projects on club.quitebasic.com. They can be sorted by popularity, recency, category, or author.

In addition, any project on club.quitebasic.com automatically defines a Google Gadget that can be put on anyone's iGoogle page, or by cut-and-pasting some HTML, it can be placed on most other web pages too.