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vunderbatoday at 5:49 AM1 replyview on HN

Definitely. I've used a few of them (Commodore BASIC, Applesoft BASIC) as a kid.

I could have worded that a bit better. What i meant was that as far as I'm aware, QBASIC was the first free OS-bundled fully featured BASIC IDE which even by today’s standards still kind of holds up:

• find and replace

• split panes

• an immediate mode

• debugging

• breakpoints

• built‑in help for every basic keyword and command.

• editing any lines (no need for line number at multiples of 10 to insert and modify at a later time)


Replies

1313ed01today at 11:47 AM

Even as someone that grew up with GW-BASIC and had moved on to Turbo Pascal by the time qbasic came out, I must say you have a point. I think however that the more traditional BASIC "IDE" with line numbers etc, used in GW-BASIC, has its charm and is still fun to play with. It's quite unlike any modern IDE, but there is some logic to it and with some practice it isn't bad for what it needed to do.

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