Expert to Expert: The Basics of SmallBasic | Charles

wisemx
Live it

Cool. SmallBasic is doing very well.
My 9 year old son loves it.

Wyrd

The choice of "Sub". This is the same as in VB when the "code chunk" won't be returning a value. It seems ok. The actual keyword "Sub" is pretty vague, it's only when we expand it to the word Sub-routine that it sounds dated. The doc files and read-me's can just refer to these blocks of code as "Subs".

--
Furry cows moo and decompress.

CRPietschmann
Chris Pietschmann

And we now have proof that VB6 just doesn't want to die. I know this isn't VB6, but it's proof that VB.NET has too steep a learning curve for some of the very beginners.

CRPietschmann
Chris Pietschmann

This brings me to the following question:

Why not just create a newer version of VB6?

lynnlangit

Love this - am using it as part of DigiGirlz curriculum in SoCal - thanks Vijaye - keep up the great work!

Dan T

Me (to daughter): Did you do any more chapters in the Small Basic tutorial?
Daughter: Yes, Daddy, I have a program that will say "Good Morning" if it's the morning, and "Good Evening" if it's night.
Me: That's great, honey!
Daughter: Also, if you type in a word, it will display the definition.
Me: What??!! [with lots of confusion and a bit of disbelief] Was that in the same chapter???
Daughter: No. I was just playing around.

She showed me the program, and the Dictionary keyword. I had to disable networking and see it quietly fail (returns nothing for definition) before I could believe it was web-service based dictionary.

Congrats on thinking out of the box and including a web-service enabled uber-function as the 12th most important keyword.
My daughter and I are *both* learning what programming is!

stevo_
Human after all

In reply to Dan T

#Jan 21st @ 5:54 AM

Thats really great!

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to Dan T

#Jan 21st @ 5:54 AM

Marvelous! Keep on coding. Pretty easy, isn't it?

C

TheLibyanGuy

You should add some Syntactic sugar to the language

1) So at least rename the TextWindow object to T ( i.e. the letter T )
and the graphics window to only G
and make the default window to selected automatically or by declaration
I don't want my kids to waste their time in typing long words
compare this :
n = T.Readnumber()
with this
n = TextWindows.Readnumber()

2) Remove redundant brackets ... for empty arguments !! so we'd have ...
   Writeln "Hello World"
   instead of
   Writeln("Hello World"

4) add BASIC keywords and GWBASIC ... such as DATA , etc

5) How about simple file handling ( open , read , write ..) ??