Is there any freeware QBASIC compatible IDE for BASIC?

Question

What freeware IDE is available other than Visual Basic?

Is there any freeware QBASIC compatible IDE for BASIC?

Answer 1

There are a number of free Basic compilers out there, but the compatibility with QBasic may be limited:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/basic.shtml

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickBASIC

Answer 2

I'd recommend looking at FreeBasic and FbEdit. It is largely QuickBasic compatible and FbEdit provides a nice Windows based IDE. There is also QB64, but I'm not aware of any slick IDE's for that one.

Answer 3

"QB64 is a compiler (C++ emitter) with an editor (IDE) that strives for 100% Qbasic and QuickBasic 4.5 compatibility." http://qb64.net/wiki/index.php?title=About_QB64

Answer 4

Have a look at FreeBASIC. It's an open source compiler and available for Windows, Linux and DOS platforms. Its licenses are GPL and partly LGPL.

On the one hand its syntax is similar to QBasic. For an even better compatibility to legacy QBasic programs it offers a QB compatibility mode, which can be enabled using the command line switch -lang qb (see the compiler dialects page in the wiki) or a preprocessor directive. So you can see it as an unofficial successor of QB.

On the other hand it adds quite a lot of new features to the traditional BASIC world, like for example

• OOP (including inheritance),
• DirectX based 2D graphics,
• support for OpenGL,
• pointers,
• network / internet programming with WinSock etc.,
• bindings for many libraries including curl, BASS, MySQL's C-API, ...

There are a few IDEs available for FreeBASIC. So you're free to choose the one you like most:

• FBIde
• FBEdit
• Firefly Visual Designer for FreeBASIC

Furthermore, Geany as a versatile editor has built-in support for FreeBASIC. Its syntax highlighting also works reasonable for QB source codes.

All the IDEs and editors mentioned in this posting are either free open source software or at least freeware.