QBasic (Another Incremental Compiler)

I discovered that QBasic 1.1 is available as a free download. Version 1.0 came with DOS 5.0 as a replacement for GW-Basic and with Windows 95, NT 3.x and NT 4.0. Version 1.1 came with DOS 6.x, Windows 95, 98, and Me. QBasic was based on QuickBasic 4.5. I was fascinated with the features of QuickBasic 4.5 when it came out, the incremental compiler aspect was intriguing, but did not think they took the user interface concepts far enough (one of the intentions of IBCP).

After getting familiar with QuickBasic 4.5, I never used it much afterward since it's compiled programs were much slower than when compiled with QuickBasic 3.0 (not an incremental compiler) for the project I was involved with at the time and continued to use GW-Basic for development and the QuickBasic 3.0 compiler for production.

QBasic does not contain any of compiler or linker elements of QuickBasic 4.5, however, the incremental compiler remains. The lines are compiled as they are entered and errors are reported immediately. QBasic is good inspiration for IBCP and will be used for comparison, both for features and run-time (though possibly unfair since QBasic is not 32-bit). QBasic will be mentioned frequently from here on (along with GW-Basic, QuickBasic 3.0 and FreeBASIC), though there is no intention of making IBCP a clone of QBasic (see FreeBASIC for that, which is just a compiler).