Microsoft commemorated the 50th birthday of the BASIC family of programming languages with the release of QuickVB, a new version of BASIC.
QuickVB runs on the Roslyn .NET compiler announced at Microsoft’s Build developer conference last month. The environment resembles QuickBasic, but the Windows console application running on Roslyn can use the semantic Classification API to colorize VB’s contextual keywords. It also shows compiler diagnostics and uses the Roslyn Recommendations API to build symbol completion lists for cursor locations.
“So many of us here on the Managed Languages team got our start with one dialect of BASIC or another [so] we couldn’t help but put together something to show our nostalgia and affection for our roots,” Microsoft’s Visual Basic team wrote in a blog post. “In homage to grandpa BASIC’s 50th we give you: QuickVB.”
John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in 1964. To check out QuickVB, download the QuickVB.zip file here.
