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TABLE OF CONTENTSIn the early days of programming, it was usually the scientific elite doing the programming and they were usually trained above and beyond the average American to do their programming work. It was not until 1964 at Dartsmouth college that the Beginner' s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code would be introduced -- more commonly known as BASIC. Using common English to perform processor tasks, BASIC became quickly popular, although it was disliked by programmers of more "low-level" languages such as assem bly and FORTRAN. In 1985 Microsoft released their own version of BASIC called QBasic with their MS-DOS 5.0 operating system. Since then, nearly every PC user owns their own copy of QBasic, making it a widely known language.
QBasic is a very simple language to pick up, and yet it can accomplish a great deal. Granted you will probably never write Doom or Word Perfect with QBasic, but it has it's strong points. One of them is to introduce people to programming without having to worry about the internal workings of the computer. It's simple to create games, business applications, simple databases, and graphics. The best aspect of the language is it's close resemblance to English.
This small tutorial introduces the simple concepts of programming to get you started, so if you already know another language or are already familiar with programming, you may want to skim through the first couple sections. Good luck!
A variable, simply defined, is a name which can contain a value. Programming involves giving values to these names and presenting them in some form to the user. A variable has a type which is defined by the kind of value it holds. If the variable holds a number, it may be of integer, floating decimal, long integer, or imaginary. If the variable holds symbols or text, it may be a character variable or a string variable. These are terms you will become accustomed to as you continue programming.
Here are some examples of values a variable might contain:
STRING "hello, this is a string" INTEGER 5 LONG 92883 SINGLE 39.2932 DOUBLE 983288.18
The first is a string. Strings contain text. The last four are number types. But the computer does not know what kind of value you are trying to give a variable unless you tell it! There are two methods of telling the computer what kind of variable you are using:
1. Explicitly declare the variable AS a type. This is done by using the DIM statement. Say you wanted to make a variable called number which would contain an integer (whole number, no digits after the decimal point). You would do it like this:
DIM number AS INTEGER
Then you would use that variable as an integer. The word DIM actually originates from the word Dimension, but you won't see why until we discuss the topic of arrays.
2. Put a symbol after the variable name which is defined as representing that type. QBasic has a set of symbols which represent each variable type:
$ String % Integer & Long ! Single # Double
Appending one of these symbols to the name of a variable when you use it in the program tells the computer that you are using it as that type. This topic of data types is actually a difficult concept to grasp for newcomers to programming. The most com mon error in QBasic is the infamous Type Mismatch which you will see a lot. This means that you are trying to put a value into a variable of the wrong type. You might be trying to put the letters "hi there" into an integer variable. If you don't define th e type of the variable, then QBasic assumes it is of the Single type, which can often yield unexpected results. I personally prefer to use the type symbols after variable names, but some explicitly declare them usually at the head of their programs.
You know what a variable is and how to control them, it's time you
learned some programming. QBasic (like all other languages) is set up
using pre-defined statements according to the syntax specified for that
statement. It may be helpful to look in t
he help index to learn a statement, although I've heard many
complaint's that the help index is too hard. Indeed it is too hard for
new programmers, but as you learn more and more statements and their
syntaxes, you'll become accustomed to the index and u
se it as a casual reference. Lets make a program that prints some text
on the screen. Type qbasic
at the DOS prompt and enter the following program.
CLS PRINT "This text will appear on the screen" END
The first statement -- CLS
-- stands for "clear screen." It erases whatever was on the screen before it was executed. PRINT
simply displays its argument to the screen at the current text cursor
location. The argument in this case is the text enclosed in quotes. PRINT
displays text within quotes directly, or it can display the value of a variable, like this:
CLS a% = 50 b% = 100 PRINT "The value of a is "; a%; " and the value of b is "; b% END
This will yield the output; The value of a is 50 and the value of b is 100. The semicolons indicate that the next time something is printed, it will be right after where the last PRINT
statement left off. Remember that PRINT
prints literally what is inside quotes, and the value of the
variable which is not in quotes. a% and b% are integers containing
values in this example, and their values are printed using the PRINT
statement.
Say you want to interact with the user now. You'll need to learn a statement called INPUT
. INPUT
displays a prompt (the first argument) and assigns what the user types in to a variable (the second argument)
CLS INPUT "What is your name? ", yourName$ INPUT "How old are you? ", age% PRINT "So, "; yourName$; ", you are "; age%; " years old. That's interesting." END
This firsts asks the user for their name and assigns it to the
string variable yourName$. Then the age is requested, and the result is
printed in a sentence. Try it out! So what happens if you input I DON'T
KNOW for the age prompt? You'll get a wei
rd message that says REDO FROM START
. Why? The program
is trying to assign a string (text) to an integer (number) type, and
this makes no sense so the user is asked to do it over again.
Another
cornerst
one of programming is the conditional test. Basically, the program
tests if a condition is true, and if it is, it does something. It looks
like English so it's not as hard as it sounds.
CLS PRINT "1. Say hello" ' option 1 PRINT "2. Say nice tie" ' option 2 INPUT "Enter your selection ", selection% IF selection% = 1 THEN PRINT "hello" IF selection% = 2 THEN PRINT "nice tie" END
The user is given a set of options, and then they input a value which is assigned to the variable selection%. The value of selection% is then tested, and code is executed based on the value. If the user pressed 1, it prints hello, but if they pressed 2, it prints nice tie. Also notice the text after the ' in the code. These are remark statements. Anything printed after a ' on a line does not affect the outcome of the program. Back to the actual code -- but what if the user doesn't i nput 1 or 2? What if they input 328? This must be taken into account as part of programming. You usually can't assume that the user has half a brain, so if they do something wrong, you can't screw up the program. So the ELSE statement comes into play. The logic goes like this: IF the condition is true, THEN do something, but if the condition is anything ELSE, then do something else. The ELSE statement is used with IF...THEN to test if a condition is anything else.
CLS INPUT "Press 1 if you want some pizza.", number% IF number% = 1 THEN PRINT "Here's your pizza" ELSE PRINT "You don't get pizza" END
That's a fairly simple example, and real life things will be much more complex. Lets try a "real life" program. QBasic is capable of fairly sophisticated math, so lets put some of it to use. Say your Algebra teacher tells you to find the areas of th e circles with some given radii, and he gives you a sheet with hundreds of radii. You decide to boot up your computer and write the following program:
CLS pi! = 3.1415 INPUT "What is the radius of the circle? ", radius! area! = pi! * radius! ^ 2 PRINT "The area of the circle is ", area! END
First, we're defining the variable pi. It's a single number, which
means that it can be a fairly large number with some decimal places.
The exclamation mark tells QBasic that pi is of the single type. Next,
the user is prompted for the radius of the
ir circle. Then the area is calculated. The * means "times," and the ^
(carrot) means "to the power of." radius! ^ 2 means "radius squared."
This could also be written as pi! * radius! * radius!.
There's
one big problem with that program. Th
e teacher gave you a sheet with hundreds of radii. For every radius,
you must run the program over again. This is not practical. If we had
some kind of a loop until we wanted to quit that just kept on repeating
over and over it would be much more useful
. Of course, QBasic has the means of performing this feat. Loop structures. They start with the statement DO
, and end with the statement LOOP
. You can LOOP UNTIL
or WHILE
, or DO UNTIL
or WHILE
a condition is true. Another option (which we will use) is to break out
of the loop manually as soon as a condition is true. Lets revise the
previous code:
CLS pi! = 3.1415 DO ' Begin the loop here INPUT "What is the radius of the circle? (-1 to end) ", radius! IF radius! = -1 THEN EXIT DO area! = pi! * radius! ^ 2 PRINT "The area of the circle is ", area! PRINT LOOP ' End the loop here END
Now we can end the program by entering -1 as the radius. The
program checks the radius after the user inputs it and checks if it is
-1. If it is, it exits the loop. If it isn't it just keeps going it's
merry way. The PRINT
with no a
rguments prints a blanks line so we can separate our answers. I highly
recommend entering this program into QBasic just so you can see exactly
how it works.
Say you want to print something
in a certain pre-defined format. Say you want to print a series of
digits with only 2 places after the decimal point and a dollar sign
before the first digit. To do this requires the PRINT USING
statement, which is very handy in applications for businesses. The PRINT USING
statement accepts two types of arguments. The first is a string which
has already been defined. This is a special type of string, in th
at it contains format specifiers, which specify the format of the
variables passed as the other arguments. Confused? You won't be. Here's
a quick list of the most common format specifiers:
### digits & Prints an entire string \ \ Prints a string fit within the backslashes. Any thing longer is truncated $$ Puts a dollar sign to the left of a number . Prints a decimal point , Prints a comma every third digit to the left of the decimal point.
And these can be combined in a format string to make a user defined
way to print something. So $$#,###.## will print a number with a dollar
sign to the left of it. If the number has more than two decimal places,
it is truncated to two. If it is mor
e than four digits long to the left of the decimal place, it is also
truncated to fit. To use a PRINT USING
statement, you must first define the format string containing the format specifiers. Then you use PRINT USING,
then the
name of the format string, and variable values to fill the places defined in the format string. Here's a code example:
CLS ' get user input INPUT "Enter item name: ", itemname$ INPUT "How many items?: ", numitems% INPUT "What does one cost?: ", itemcost! CLS ' display inputs format$ = "\ \ #,### $$#,###.## $$#,###,###.##" PRINT "Item Name Quantity Cost Total Cost "
PRINT "-------------- -------- ---------- --------------" totalcost! = numitems% * itemcost! PRINT USING format$; itemname$; numitems%; itemcost!; totalcost! END
First, we get the item name, number of items, and cost per item from
the user. Then we clear the screen and define the format string to be
used. It contains a static length string (text that will be truncated
if it is too long), up to 4 digits for th
e quantity, 4 digits and two decimals for the item cost, and 7 digits
and two decimals for the total cost. Then we print out some column
headers so we know what each value will represent, and some nice lines
to go under the column headers. Then the tota
l cost is calculated by multiplying the number of items by the item
cost. Finally, the four variable's values are displayed under the
column headers using the PRINT USING
statement.
There are numerous methods to manipulate data and present it to the user in QBasic. One is called an array. An array is a variable which can contain more than one value. For example, you might have an array called a, and yo u could assign data to the members of that array. There might be a value for a(1), and a different value for a(6). Before an array can be used, it must be declared. Arrays are declared with the DIM statement used in section 1. Here is an example of an array declaration:
DIM a(1 TO 100) AS INTEGER
There are now 100 different values that can be assigned to the array a, and they must all be integers. It could also look like this:
DIM a%(1 TO 100)
Using the symbol % for integer. We call the different values for the array members of the array. Array a has 100 members. Array members can be assigned values by using a subscript number within parentheses after the array name, like this:
a%(1) = 10 a%(2) = 29 a%(3) = 39
And so on. Now you're probably wondering why the statement for declare is DIM
.
This comes from a term used in earlier programming languages that means
dimension. That still doesn't answer the question... why not use the
statement
DECLARE
? Well, an array can have
more than one dimension. Arrays with multiple dimensions have y members
in the second dimension for every x member of the first dimension in
the following algorithm:
DIM array( 1 TO x, 1 TO y) AS INTEGER
So if the actual declaration looked like this:
DIM a$( 1 TO 3, 1 TO 3)
You would have the following members to assign values to:
a$(1,1) a$(1,2) a$(1,3) a$(2,1) a$(2,2) a$(2,3) a$(3,1) a$(3,2) a$(3,3)
A two dimensional array is useful for tracking the status of each piece in a checkers game, or something of the like. Recall the last example program of section that we had a program that would ask the user for the item name, the item cost, and the qu antity of that item, the spit out the data just given in a nice format with the total in the right hand column. Well, with only one item, this program isn't very practical. But now with our newfound knowledge of arrays and the knowledge we already have of loops, we can create a somewhat useful application. The process will start with the program prompting the user for the number of items that will be calculated. Then the program loops for the number of times that the user entered at the beginning, ass igning the data entered into a member of an array we will declare. A variable called netTotal! will be displayed at the end of the program which will contain the total costs of the items. netTotal! will accumulate each time through the loop as the curre nt totalCost! is added to it. Type the following code:
CLS INPUT "How many items to be calculated? ", totalItems% DIM itemName$(1 TO totalItems%) ' Declare our arrays DIM itemCost!(1 TO totalItems%) DIM numItems%(1 TO totalItems%) DIM totalCost!(1 TO totalItems%) FOR i% = 1 TO totalItems% 'First loop: get inputs CLS PRINT "Item "; i% ' Display the current item number PRINT INPUT "Item name -- ", itemName$(i%) INPUT "Item cost -- ", itemCost!(i%) INPUT "Quantity --- ", numItems%(i%) totalCost!(i%) = itemCost!(i%) * numItems%(i%) NEXT i% CLS PRINT "Summary" PRINT format$ = "\ \ $$#,###.## #,### $$#,###,###.##" PRINT "Item name Item Cost Quantity Total Cost " PRINT "----------------- ---------- -------- --------------" FOR i% = 1 TO totalItems% PRINT USING format$; itemName$(i%); itemCost!(i%); numItems%(i%); totalCost!(i%) netTotal! = netTotal! + totalCost!(i%) NEXT i% PRINT PRINT "Net Total = "; netTotal! END
This program is much larger than
anything we've done as of yet. It is kind of a review of everything
we've done so far and one additional feature: the FOR...NEXT
loop. This kind of loop loops for the number of times specified. A
value is given to a variable and the program loops until that variable
is equal or greater than the number specified after the TO
.
FOR i% = 1 TO 10
PRINT i%
NEXT i%
Will loop 10 times, printing the numbers 1 through 10. The loop ends with a NEXT
statement followed by the variable the loop increments for. So in our
program, we have loops with index numbers (i%) starting at 1 and
increasing for every number between 1 and the totalItems%, which is
given by the user in the first part of the program. After the user
inputs the number of items that will be calculated, four arrays are
DIMensioned. They are one dimensional arrays, so they aren't very comp
lex. The first FOR...NEXT
loop prompts the user for each item. Then the format string is defined and the column headers are printed. The second FOR...NEXT
loop cycles through the members of the four arrays and prints the data u
sing the format string. The data for each member was assigned in the first FOR...NEXT
loop. Each cycle through the second loop, the totalCost! of the current
item being printed is added to the variable netTotal!. The netTotal! is
the total sum of the total costs. After the second FOR...NEXT
loop, the net total is printed and the program ends.
Say we have a game and when the user makes a record score, they get to write their name on a list of the 10 best scores. But the next time the user plays the game, we want the name and position they recorded the last time they played to still be there . To do this, we must write to what is called a file, and then read it again later. If you are computer literate, then no doubt you know what a file is, and since you are using the internet to read this, I'm assuming you are. So we need to write to file . Before you can do anything to a file, you must open it, and there are different ways you can open a file, believe it or not. A file can be opened so you can read from it or write to it, or it can be opened and split into records like a database. Here is a quick table of the different ways you can open a file:
Input | Read data from the file |
Output | Write data to the file |
Append | Write data to the end of a file |
Binary | Read from or write to a file in binary mode |
Random | Read from or write to a file which is split up in records like a database |
The syntax for the OPEN
statement is quite peculiar. It's arguments require us to specify a
file name, an access type (the 5 types defined above), and a file
number. When the file is open, QBasic recognizes i
t by a number which we assign to the file when we open it. All
references made to the file use this number. It can be any number from
1 to 255. An open statement may look like this:
OPEN "sample.txt" FOR INPUT AS #1
We will be reading data from this file because it was opened for input. Back to our problem about the game scores. Lets set up a program which will ask for their name and give them a random score. Then it will put their name on the list at the approp riate place on the top 10 (if it makes the list). We'll call the file "top10.dat." But say when the user buys the game, there are already 10 names and scores in there. We write the following program to put default names and scores into top10.dat:
CLS OPEN "top10.dat" FOR OUTPUT AS #1 FOR i% = 1 TO 10 playername$ = "Player" + STR$(i%) playerscore% = 1000 - (i% * 100) WRITE #1, playername$, playerscore% NEXT i% CLOSE #1 PRINT "Data written to file" END
There are a couple strange features of this program that we have not
seen yet. In the second line of the program the file is opened for
output so we can write to it. In the fourth line of the program we get
into some light string manipulation. A nam
e is generated from the word player, and is concatenated with string
form of the current loop number. You can concatenate two strings by
using the + operator. The STR$
function returns the string representation o
f the number passed to it. The opposite of the STR$
function is the VAL
function, which returns the numeric value of the string passed to it. Lastly, the WRITE
statement w
rites to the file number specified as the first argument the values of
the following arguments. Data is written to file in a format readable
by the INPUT #
statement which we will use in the actual program. We need this short program for th
e big one to work so we can give the program data to read from, or else we will get a nasty INPUT PAST END OF FILE
error when we try to run it. Note that the file should be closed when we are done with it by using the CLOSE
state
ment followed by the file number.
And now we come to the big program, as I have referred to it. It is quite large and complex, and I have not fully described all the statements used in it, so I have broken it down to five sections which I will describe in detail afterwards. Here, at l ast, is the code:
' section 1 CLS RANDOMIZE TIMER yourScore% = INT(RND * 1000) PRINT "Game Over" PRINT "Your score is "; yourScore% DIM playername$(1 TO 10) 'Declare arrays for the 10 entries on the list DIM playerscore%(1 TO 10) ' section 2 OPEN "top10.dat" FOR INPUT AS #1 DO WHILE NOT EOF(1) ' EOF means "end of file" i% = i% + 1 INPUT #1, playername$(i%) 'Read from file INPUT #1, playerscore%(i%) LOOP CLOSE #1 PRINT ' section 3 FOR i% = 1 TO 10 IF yourScore% >= playerscore%(i%) THEN FOR ii% = 10 TO i% + 1 STEP -1 'Go backwards (i% < 10) playername$(ii%) = playername$(ii% - 1) playerscore%(ii%) = playerscore%(ii% - 1) NEXT ii% PRINT "Congratulations! You have made the top 10!" INPUT "What is your name? ", yourName$ playername$(i%) = yourName$ playerscore%(i%) = yourScore% EXIT FOR END IF NEXT i% ' section 4 OPEN "top10.dat" FOR OUTPUT AS #1 FOR i% = 1 TO 10 WRITE #1, playername$(i%), playerscore%(i%) NEXT i% CLOSE #1 ' section 5 PRINT PRINT "Here is the top 10" format$ = "\ \ #### " PRINT "Player Name Score" PRINT "-------------------------- -----" FOR i% = 1 TO 10 PRINT USING format$; playername$(i%); playerscore%(i%) NEXT i% END
Section 1: The screen is cleared. The second line contains the statement RANDOMIZE TIMER
.
When dealing with random numbers, we must give the computer a number so
it has something to base th
e random number it will create from. This number is called the random
seed generator. A random seed generator can be specified with the RANDOMIZE
statement. For the seed, we need a number that will not be the same every time we run a progr
am, so we decide to use the number of seconds which have elapsed since midnight. The TIMER
statement accesses a system device called the system timer, and returns
the current number of seconds which have elapsed since midnight. Since
this n
umber will change in each program we run, this can be used for the
random seed. The variable yourScore% is given a random number from 0 to
1000. In the last part of section one, we declare two arrays with 10
members each.
Section 2: In the first line we open the file for input, so
we can read from it. The second line appears to be very weird at first.
We are starting a loop with the DO
statement, and then a condition to do while. The function EOF
tests the file number passed to the function -- in this case 1 -- and if the end of the file (EOF
) has been encountered it returns true. So EOF(1)
is true if we are reading the end of the f
ile. But we are using the Boolean operator NOT
,
so we want to loop while the end of file condition is false. We want to
do the loop while we are not reading from the end of file 1. You will
learn more about Boolean operators (NOT, AN
D, OR, XOR
, etc.) as you continue programming. Then we assign the current data in the file to the arrays we declared in section 1. The INPUT #
statement is used to read from the specified file into the specified variable(s) until a co
mma or carriage return is encountered.
Section 3: The main purpose of this section is to re-write
the top 10 list if the player's randomly generated score places on the
list. We do this by cycling through the list, and testing if yourScore%
is greater than or equal to (>=) the c
urrent playerscore% being tested. If it is, then we have to shift each
existing score below the current one down one to make room for the new
score being added. The user is congratulated and prompted for their
name. The loop is then exited using the
Section 4: This short section simply opens the file for output so we can write to it. Then we write each of the members of the array to file.
Section 5: In this final section we define the format string, print the headers, and then print all the members of the top 10 and their scores. And that's the end of the program!
Now on to a new topic, which will later become related to the previous. User defined types. Recall that a type is the type of value a variable can have, such as integer, string, long, double, or single. You can creat e your own types which contain one or more of the already defined types. Here is an example of a user defined type:
TYPE employeeType firstname AS STRING * 30 lastname AS STRING * 30 age AS INTEGER wage AS SINGLE END TYPE
We have defined a new type, which consists of four data members, as I call them. We can now declare a variable of this type:
DIM employee AS employeeType
A variable of a user defined type is like an array, in that it can have more than one value assigned to it. But you can have an array of a variable of a user defined type as well, so things can get rather complex. Anyway, now that you have a user def ined type, you can assign values to the data members of that variable. Use a period to access a data member of a type, like this:
employee.firstname = "Bob" employee.lastname = "Foster" employee.age = 24 employee.wage = 6.78
This could have been helpful in the last program we made with the top 10 list. We could have declared a user defined type called playerType, like this:
TYPE playerType name AS STRING * 20 score AS INTEGER END TYPE
and then declared an array of variables of that type
DIM player(1 TO 10) AS playerType
That would have made our code more efficient, but not necessarily more readable. Notice when we declare a string in a user defined type that it seems as if we are multiplying it by a number. Actually, we the number after the * defines the maximum len gth of the string. You must define this because the size of a user defined type must be known by the computer. Any value assigned to this string data member which exceeds the length specified is truncated.
User defined types can serve more than to be efficient. They are the
heart of the random access file mode, which is commonly used in
database files. A database is a method of organizing large quantities
of information in records and fields. In a rec
ord, there are a set of fields which are constant in every record. A
field's value changes from record to record, however. Just the name of
the field remains constant. So how does this relate to user defined
types? Well think of a variable of a user d
efined type as a record in the database, and the data members fields of
the records. Employee may be a record, and firstname, lastname, age,
and wage may be fields. Values can be assigned to the fields in each
record, thus constructing a database. A fi
le opened for random access is organized in this fashion, with records
split into fields. Each record in the random access file is given a
record number which can be convenient in a database environment. In the LEN
function to get the size in bytes of the employee variable, which is an employeeType. Here's the code:
recordLen# = LEN(employee) OPEN "database.dat" FOR RANDOM AS #1 LEN = recordLen#
LEN
stands for length. You can also use the LEN
function to get the number of characters in a string, but that is kind
of irrelevant right now. So let's construct a simple database that will
keep tra
ck of the employees of a business.
' Section 1 CLS TYPE employeeType firstname AS STRING * 30 lastname AS STRING * 30 age AS INTEGER
wage AS SINGLE END TYPE DIM employee AS employeeType ' Section 2 PRINT "1.) Create new recordset" PRINT "2.) View existing recordset" INPUT "Which option? ", selection% ' Section 3 IF selection% = 1 THEN INPUT "How many employees are in the company? ", numRecords% recordLen# = LEN(employee) OPEN "database.dat" FOR RANDOM AS #1 LEN = recordLen# FOR i% = 1 TO numRecords% CLS INPUT "First name: ", employee.firstname INPUT "Last name: ", employee.lastname INPUT "Age: ", employee.age INPUT "Wage: ", employee.wage PUT #1, ,employee NEXT i% CLS CLOSE #1 PRINT "Recordset creation complete" END END IF ' Section 4 IF selection% = 2 THEN recordLen# = LEN(employee) OPEN "database.dat" FOR RANDOM AS #1 LEN = recordLen# format$ = "\ \,\ \ ### $$##.##" PRINT "Last name First name Age Wage " PRINT "------------------ ------------------ --- -------" DO WHILE NOT EOF(1) GET #1, ,employee 'Sorry about the length of this line!!! PRINT USING format$; employee.lastname; employee.firstname; employee.age; employee.wage LOOP CLOSE #1 END END IF
I've split this program into sections again because that seems to work well for the larger ones.
Section 1: We're defining the user defined type and declaring a variable of that type.
Section 2: The first thing the user sees is a menu with the option to either create a new database (recordset) or view the existing one. The user is prompted to make a selection which is stored in the variable selection%.
Section 3: If the user chose option 1 -- create a new
recordset -- then this code is executed. First we prompt the user for
how many employees are in the company so we know how many times to go
through a loop. Then we open the file, prompt the user for the data for
each variable, and write the whole record to file. The record is written using the PUT
statement. The first argument in PUT
is the file number, the second is the record number, and the third is
the data to be written to file. If no record number is specified for
the second argument, the current file position is used, which will just
append what we specify after what is already there. This works fine, so
we don't need to worry about explicit record numbers. Notice that we
are writing the whole employee variable to file. This is because we
write records to file, and the whole variable contains the data for the
data members (fields).
Section 4: If the user chooses to view the existing
recordset, then we first open the file, define a format string for the
printout, and print the headers. Next we have a loop until the end of
file is encountered. Notic
e the GET
statement, which is used to read from a random access file. The first
argument is the file number we want to read from, the second is the
record number (which we are leaving blank because we can read from the
current position [
CP] like we did in the PUT statement), and the third is the variable in
which we read the data in to. This variable must be of the same type
that we wrote with or else the types will be incompatible. You'd
probably get a TYPE MISMATCH
error
if a different variable is used because the fields are not equal, so the program does not know what to assign the data to.
Well that's it for random access. If you have understood half of what I've said, feel good. You have a good knowledge of what QBasic is about. Now on to some more advanced programming!
Graphics programming in QBasic can get fairly complex. Lets start from the beginning. Your screen is made up of hundreds of pixels. The number of pixels horizontally and the vertically determines the resolution of you r monitor. In DOS you can be in one of any number of graphics modes, which define the current graphics resolution (pixels), text resolution (characters), number of colors, and number of video pages. There are 13 screen graphics modes in QBasic, and each has its different purpose. You can look in the help index in QBasic for a listing of the screen graphics modes and their specifications. Each of the aspects of a screen graphics type can be changed to create effects.
There are a number of graphics routines used in QBasic which allow a variety of graphical effects. Lets try a few:
SCREEN 12 LINE (0,0)-(640,480), 1 CIRCLE (320, 240), 20, 2 PSET (10,10), 14 DRAW "c15 bm100,400 l5e5f5l5" END
The first line initializes the graphics mode to 12, which is 16 colors, 1 page of video memory, and 640x480 resolution.
LINE
draws a line from one coordinate to another. The
first optional argument after the coordinates (which are not optional)
is the color. After that, a B
("box") or BF
("box fill") can be used to draw a box or a box filled with the color
specified. The first coordinate can be omitted and the - left in to
draw a line from the current graphics position (CP) to the relative
coordinates specified. LINE -(100,0)
will draw a line from the current g
raphics position to 100 pixels to the right.
CIRCLE
draws a circle
with the center at the coordinates specified. The first argument
(required) after the coordinates is the radius of the circle. Then
comes the color. After that, if you want to draw an arc, is the
starting angle of the arc in radians, then the
ending angle of the arc. To make an arc, first touch up on your
geometry, then recall that to convert from degrees to radians is PI
(3.14159265) divided by 180. The last argument is used if you want to
make an ellipse, and is the ratio of the y axis to the x axis. So CIRCLE (320,240), 20, 2, 3.1415, 0, .5
would draw an elliptical green arc with the center at the middle of the screen, starting at 180 degrees (PI) and going t
o 0 degrees, with a compression ratio of 1 to 2 (x axis twice as big as the y). This looks like a wide smiley face mouth.
PSET
fills a pixel at the screen coordinate you specify with the color you specify. In this case, yellow.
Finally, the DRAW
statement. The DRAW
statement has it's own commands which I strongly suggest you memorize.
When we get in to scaling and rotation you will need to know your draw
commands pretty well. The draw command in the above code example can be
read as "color 15 (white), move without drawing to screen coordinate
100,400, draw left 5 units, draw up and right 5 units, draw down and
right 5 units, and draw left 5 units." In other words, a tr
iangle. A unit is set by the current scale mode, which by default is 4.
Since default scale mode is 4, one unit represents 4 pixels. So our
triangle is 40 pixels wide at the base.
There are 16 defined colors in QBasic, graphics mode 12. The COLOR
statement sets the current color for text output. I highly recommend memorizing the colors as well. Run this program:
SCREEN 12 FOR i% = 0 TO 15 COLOR i% PRINT "COLOR"; i% NEXT i%
This will print out the 16 colors used in QBasic. 0 is black, so that obviously won't show up. An quick reference for colors while you're in the QBasic IDE (integrated development environment) is to look under the OPTIONS | DISPLAY menu. The colors listed there are in the QBasic order, starting with black and ending with bright white.
Now you know the basic graphics routines and their uses... lets make a couple programs that demonstrate them to a greater extent. First, a program which prompts the user for a radius, calculates the area and circumference, and draws the circle in a ra ndom color on the screen.
SCREEN 12 RANDOMIZE TIMER CONST pi! = 3.1415 DO COLOR 15: INPUT "Radius (-1 to quit) --> ", radius! IF radius! = -1 THEN EXIT DO area! = pi! * radius! ^ 2 circum! = pi! * 2 * radius! COLOR 14 PRINT "Area = "; area! PRINT "Circumference = "; circum! CIRCLE (320,240), radius!, INT(RND * 15 + 1) DO: LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = "" CLS LOOP COLOR 9: PRINT "Good Bye!" END
We first set the screen graphics mode and generate a random seed
number based on the system timer. Then we prompt for the radius in a
vivid bright white, and test to see if we should end the program. We
then calculate the area and circumference, and p
rint the results in yellow. Then we draw the circle from the middle of
the screen at the radius given in a random color. This random color is set by first generating a random number from 0 to 14, adding 1 to it, and converting
it to an integer with the INT
function. The next line seems weird. The INKEY$
statement reads the keyboard and returns the string representation of the key pressed. We are looping while INKE
Y$
is nothing, or in other words, while the user isn't pressing anything.
The loop goes on forever until the user presses any key, and at this
time a value will be given to INKEY$
which you might decide to use. The screen is then clea
red for the next entry. If the user breaks the loop by entering -1 for the radius, we print Good Bye! in bright blue letters.
There are a lot more colors than
just 16. In fact, you can change the values of each of the 16 colors to
represent some other color that you specify. You do this with the PALETTE
statement. The following applies to screen modes 12 and 13. This
statement has two arguments: the color you want to change and the color
you specify. Specifying a color is the hard part. Here is my version of
the syntax of the palette statement
PALETTE
color, blueValue * 256 ^ 2 + greenValue * 256 + redValue
color is the color you are changing. The _Values are numbers from 0 to 63 which specify the intensity of that color. You must use the multipliers after the values and use the addition operator to separate them. So lets make a program that fades the s creen in and out, from black to purple. (blue and red make purple).
SCREEN 12 DO FOR i% = 1 TO 63 PALETTE 0, i% * 256 ^ 2 + i% NEXT i% FOR i% = 63 TO 1 STEP -1 PALETTE 0, i% * 256 ^ 2 + i% NEXT i% LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = "" END
We start by changing the value of black (0), which is the background color to purple, from one degree of blue + red to the next. Then we bring it back down to black by decreasing the blue + red value. We do this over and over until the user presses a key or begins to have seizures.
Scaling and rotation can be accomplished quite easily with the DRAW
statement, although it involves some weird looking code. First, lets define a shape that we can scale and rotate.
box$ = "bu5 l5 d10 r10 u10 l5 bd5"
Interpretation: "move up 5 spaces without drawing, draw 5 spaces
left, draw 10 spaces down, draw 10 spaces right, draw 10 spaces up,
draw 5 spaces left, and move 5 spaces down without drawing." This forms
a box. Notice that I started at the center a
nd not at a corner or side which would seem to be easier. Well, when
you rotate something, it draws based on the starting point of the
object, and we want it to rotate so if we put a pen at each corner of
the box, it would draw a perfect circle. Therefo
re we set the center of the box as the starting point of the object. I
call this the "object handle," not to be confused with the handle used
in the Windows API. The ta draw command stands for "turn angle," and
obviously turns the object in the degrees you specify. So if we turned
the box from 0 to 360 degrees, drawing the box at each step and erasing
the previous image, we would get a rotating box. But we need one more function: VARPTR$
.
VARPTR$
stands for "variable pointer," a term you can completely ignore unless
you get into C or Assembly programming. We need to somehow get the box$
shape into the draw string command we use implement in the loop, so we
have to take the address of the obje
ct string and plug it into the draw string. This can be accomplished by
using the X command, which tells VARPTR$
where to plug in the string's address so it can be used. With box$ defined above, here's the code for a rotating box:
DO angle% = angle% + 1 IF angle% >= 360 THEN angle% = 1 DRAW "c0 bm320,240 ta" + STR$(angle% - 1) + "X" + VARPTR$(box$) DRAW "c1 bm320,240 ta" + STR$(angle%) + "X" + VARPTR$(box$) LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = "" END
Not that hard is it? We draw the box at the previous angle in black, and then draw the box at the current angle in blue.
Scaling is done pretty much the same way, but
instead of changing the angle and erasing the previous image, we change
the scale factor and erase the previous image. Recall that the default
scale factor for the DRAW
st
atement is 4 pixels per unit. Well, if we increase this factor then we
will have more pixels per unit, thus giving the image the effect of
enlargement. So if we set up a FOR...NEXT
loop which will increase the scale factor from 2 to, say, 2
00, we will get the effect of scaling. But lets start with a smaller
image which is maybe 8 pixels wide from the start instead of 40 so we
get a more dramatic effect.
SCREEN 12 box$ = "bu4 l4 d8 r8 u8 l4 bd4" FOR s% = 2 TO 200 DRAW "c0 bm320,240 s" + STR$(s% - 1) + "X" + VARPTR$(box$) DRAW "c2 bm320,240 s" + STR$(s%) + "X" + VARPTR$(box$) NEXT s% END
Notice what we're doing here. We are starting the scale factor at one half of default (2) because the FOR...NEXT
loop starts with s% at 2. The s draw command sets the scale factor.
Notice also that we must continuously anchor the object handle at a
point to keep it scaling about the handle. We do this by moving the
object handle to 320,240 (center of screen) each time through the loop.
Whenever we want to put a number into the draw string, we must
concatenate the string format (
STR$
)
of the number within the string. Instead of concatenating the box$ with
the rest of the string, it is faster to only pass the address of the
substring with the VARPTR$
function.
So what if you want to scale and rotate something at the same time? Simple, just set up a FOR...NEXT
loop
which increases the scale factor as before, and within the loop
increase the angle. But instead of subtracting a factor for the ang
le to erase the previous angle, lets do it this way: erase the previous
image with the current angle, increase the angle, then draw the current
image with the new current angle. This way if we want to change the
factor at which the angle increases, we wi
ll only have to change one number instead of two
SCREEN 12 box$ = "bu4 l4 d8 r8 u8 l4 bd4" FOR s% = 2 TO 250 DRAW "c0 bm320,240 ta" + STR$(a%) + "s" + STR$(s% - 1) + "X" + VARPTR$(box$) a% = a% + 1 IF a% >= 360 THEN a% = 1 DRAW "c1 bm320,240 ta" + STR$(a%) + "s" + STR$(s%) + "X" + VARPTR$(box$) NEXT s% END
Try it out! Draw strings can get fairly complex, but you'll get used to them with practice and when you memorize the draw string commands.
The screen coordinates for different
screen modes can be fairly difficult to work with, and they do tend to
be weird numbers. To make your code simpler to write, you can define a
logical plane over the physical plane. A
n example of a physical plane is the 640x480 resolution established by
the SCREEN 12
screen mode. You can define a logical, or alternate user-defined plane with the WINDOW
statement.
SCREEN 12 WINDOW (0,0)-(100,100) CIRCLE (50,50),10,4 LINE (0,0)-(50,50),2 END
This trivial example defines a logical plane which is 100x100. 50,50
is now the center of the screen, so this draws a red circle from the
center with a radius of 10. The line statement draws a green line from
the lower left corner to the center of the screen. Notice that defining
a logical plane sets the origin (0,0) to the bottom left of the screen,
instead of the default upper left. If you want the origin to be in the upper left with a logical plane, add the SCRE
EN
keyword after WINDOW
. So to define the graphics mode 12 screen resolution, the code is:
SCREEN 12 WINDOW SCREEN (0,0)-(640,480)
Use whatever is more comfortable, but I would recommend using WINDOW SCREEN
because there is less confusion when converting from logical to physical planes.
Finally, a little information on creating DRAW
effects with the other QBasic graphics routines. Hope you know some
trigonometry for this part. Recall that in the unit circle, which has a
radius of 1, that the coordinates of a point on the circle given an
angle is defined as ( COS(angle), SIN(angle) )
.
Furthermore, if we are given a point on the circle, we can find the
angle by drawing a vertical line perpendicular to the x axis from the
point
. If we take the arctangent of the vertical length of this line divided
by the horizontal distance of this line from the origin, we will get
the angle. So the angle is defined as ATN(Y/X)
.
With this knowledge, it would be possible to creat
e a spinning line using only the line command. If we create a loop
which increments the angle from 0 to 360 then we can take to COS,SIN
of the angle to get the point we should draw to. But there's only one more problem. The QBasic functio
ns COS
and SIN
think in radians, so we must first convert the angle to radians by
multiplying PI / 180. That is quite easily done. Here is the code:
SCREEN 12 CONST PI = 3.1415 WINDOW SCREEN (-1,1)-(1,-1) DO LINE (0,0)-(COS(a% * PI / 180),SIN(a% * PI / 180)), 0 a% = a% + 1 IF a% >= 360 THEN a% = 1 LINE (0,0)-(COS(a% * PI / 180),SIN(a% * PI / 180)), 14 LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = "" END
We start by initializing the graphics mode, then defining PI as a
constant - a variable which will never change in the program execution.
Then define the logical plane, and start the loop. The line starts from
the center of the screen and goes to the coordinate specified by the COS,SIN
of the angle. We loop until the user presses a key.
There is one more type of graphics that
QBasic has a strong point for : text. Graphical effects can be made
quite easily using only text in QBasic. There are a few functions that
are quite useful when dealing with text. T
he first is the CHR$
function. If you pass a number to the CHR$
function, it will return the ASCII (American standard code for
information interchange) text value of that number. To find a listing
of the ASCII character codes, look in the help contents, and there is a
listing there. For example, to print a smiley face on the screen, the
code is this:
CLS PRINT CHR$(1) END
Since the ASCII character code for a smiley face is 1, you can use the CHR$
function to get this. Another useful function is ASC, which returns the ASCII value of a text value you pass to it.
So ASC("A")
will return 65 because the ASCII value of A is
65. Every printable character (and then some) have an ASCII value, so these two functions make it quite easy.
Finally, the LOCATE
statement is extremely useful for any text based program. LOCATE
sets the text CP to the coordinates you specify. The first argument is the column, and the second is the row.
So
CLS LOCATE 5,10 PRINT CHR$(219) END
Will print a solid white block at column 5, row 10. And that's it for graphics! You now know nearly every graphics routine in QBasic, and have the knowledge to make a game or highly graphical program. Graphics depend on how you arrange them, so it requires an artistic skill to some degree. If you get creative with these graphics commands, you can create nearly any effect you need.
It is not practical in real world terms to set up an application in one long list of code. Many early programming languages were purely linear, meaning that they started from one point on a list of code, and ended at another point. All of the code I have written in this tutorial so far has been purely linear. However, linear programming is not practical in a team environment. If one person could write one aspect of code, and another write another part of the progr am, things would be much more organized. QBasic contains the capability to meet these needs, called modular programming. You can break a program into different "modules" which are separate from the main program and yet can be accessed by any part of it. I highly recommend the use of separate modules in programming applications, although it is not a simple task to learn.
These separate modules are also known as procedures in the QBasic environment. There are two types of procedures: subs and functions. Subs merely execute a task and return to the main program, which functions execute a task and return a value to the main program. An example of a sub might be a procedure which displays a title screen on the screen, while a function may be a procedure that returns a degree in degrees given a number in radians. Function procedures are also used in Calculus, so you Calculus people should already be familiar with functions.
Procedures can accept arguments in what is called an argument list.
Each argument in the argument list has a defined type, and an object of
that type must be passed to the procedure when it is called. For
example, the CHR$
QBasic functio
n accepts a numeric argument. The function itself converts this numeric
argument into a string representation of the ASCII value of the number
passed, and returns this one character string.
Procedures in QBasic are given their own screen. When you enter the
QBasic IDE, you are in the main procedure which can access all the
others. Other procedures are created by typing the type of procedure (SUB
or FUNCTION
),
t
he procedure name, followed by the complete argument list. You can view
your procedures through the VIEW menu. Here is an example of a sub
procedure which performs some operations for a program that will be
using graphics, random numbers, and a logical plane.
SUB initProgram() RANDOMIZE TIMER SCREEN 12 WINDOW (0,0)-(100,100) COLOR 15 END SUB
The only thing you need to type is SUB initProgram ()
, and the screen will be switched to that procedure. The END SUB
is placed there for you, so the only thing you need to type then is the code within the sub. Try typing thi
s out on your own to see how this works. This procedure is called by simply typing initProgram
in the main procedure. An alternative method is CALL initProcedure ()
. Right here the parentheses are optional, but if you were to
pass arguments to the procedure, parentheses would be required with the CALL
statement. Now lets try passing an argument to a procedure. We will
pass two arguments to a procedure called center which are a string
containing the text to be c
entered, and the horizontal location on the screen at which you wish to
center it.
SUB center( text$, hLoc% ) LOCATE hLoc%, 41 - (LEN(text$) / 2) PRINT text$ END SUB
The first line after the sub declaration positions the starting point of the text at the horizontal location we passed at the second argument and vertical coordinate. The vertical coordinate is calculated by subtracting one half the screen's width in characters (41) and half the LENgth of the text we passed as the first argument. We would call center from the main procedure like this:
center "Programmed by QP7", 12
Or like this
CALL center ("Programmed by QP7", 12)
It's quite simple actually. Functions are slightly different and involve an additional part which subs do not: a return value. The return value is specified by assigning the value you want to return to the function name from within the function defin ition. When calling the function from within the main procedure, the name of the function is treated as a value which is evaluated at compile-time. Here is an example of a function definition:
FUNCTION convert.To.Radians (degree!) LET PI = 3.1415 convert.To.Radians = degree! * PI / 180 END SUB
The function is implicitly called in this program
CLS INPUT "Enter a value in degrees: ", degreeValue! radianValue! = convert.To.Radians(degreeValue!) PRINT "The radian equivalent is"; radianValue!; "radians" END
We treat the value returned from the function as a value we can
immediately assign to another value. The variable radianValue! is given
the value returned from convert.To.Radians
. These concepts are supported in all programming languages
, so this information will be beneficial to you in the future.
There is one final concept which has proven to be very successful in
programming: a message loop. With QBasic, you can construct a loop
which runs for the length of the program, receives input from the user,
and executes a message based on what the us
er does. We will construct a basic application which receives input
from the user in the form of an arrow key, and moves a box on the
screen based on the direction the user pressed. The arrow keys are different from nor
mal inputted keys received with INKEY$
. On the enhanced 101 keyboards which have arrow keys, INKEY$
returns two values: the ASCII text representation of the key pressed,
and the keyboard scan code of the key pressed. Since the arrow keys do
not have an ASCII text representation, we must use the keyboard scan
codes for them. The keyboard scan codes can be viewed in the HELP |
CONTENTS section of the QBasic menus. For this program, we will have
two procedures in addition to the main procedure. The first will
initialize the program settings and position the character in his
starting position. The other will move the guy in the direction which
we pass to the function. The main procedure will call the sub
procedures and contain
s the main message loop which retrieves input from the user. First of
all, here is the code for the main procedure:
CONST UP = 1 CONST DOWN = 2 CONST LEFT = 3 CONST RIGHT = 4 TYPE objectType x AS INTEGER y AS INTEGER END TYPE DIM object AS objectType initScreen object.x = 41 object.y = 24 DO SELECT CASE INKEY$ CASE CHR$(0) + CHR$(72): move UP, object CASE CHR$(0) + CHR$(80): move DOWN, object CASE CHR$(0) + CHR$(75): move LEFT, object CASE CHR$(0) + CHR$(77): move RIGHT, object CASE CHR$(32): EXIT DO END SELECT LOOP LOCATE 1,1: PRINT "Thank you for playing" END
This code is fairly self explanatory with the exception of the SELECT CASE... END SELECT
structure which I have not yet explained. This type of conditional testing format tests a condition, and several
cases for that condition are then tested. In this case, we are seeing IF INKEY$ = CHR$(0) + CHR$(72)
, IF INKEY$ = CHR$(0) + CHR$(80)
, and so on. This is just a more legible format than IF...THEN...ELSE
. Note that
in the QuickBasic compiler, a CASE ELSE
statement is required in the structure for what reason I have no idea.
The above code is the driver for the rest of the program. First
some CONSTants are declared which remain co
nstant for the duration of the program and in any module. A user
defined type is declared to store the coordinates of the character.
Then an endless loop is executed, calling the appropriate procedure for
the arrow key pressed until the user presses the space bar (CHR$(32)
). Here is the code for the initScreen procedure:
SUB initScreen () SCREEN 12 COLOR 9 WIDTH 80,50 LOCATE 24,41 PRINT CHR$(1) END SUB
The WIDTH 80,50
statement
sets the screen text resolution to 80 columns and 50 rows. We then
print a smiley face in the middle of the screen in a nice bright blue
color. Next we need to write the move proc
edure, and then we will be done with the program.
SUB move (way AS INTEGER, object AS objectType) LOCATE object.y, object.x PRINT CHR$(0) ' erase previous image SELECT CASE way CASE UP: IF object.y > 1 THEN object.y = object.y - 1 CASE DOWN: IF object.y < 49 THEN object.y = object.y + 1 CASE LEFT: IF object.x > 1 THEN object.x = object.x - 1 CASE RIGHT: IF object.x < 79 THEN object.x = object.x + 1 END SELECT LOCATE object.y, object.x PRINT CHR$(1) ' draw current image END SUB
And that's the whole program... confusing as it may be! Ideas should be going through your head about what you could do with this information. Entire games can be created with this simple construct.
There are more things to consider, but they are beyond the scope of this tutorial. If you were to design an application in QBasic, you would only need the information from this section and one heck of an imagination. Programming takes k nowledge of the language and a creative mind... programs are made by programmers with both. If you can develop a creative mind, then you can develop any program conceivable.
If you've read this tutorial and understood the information within, you can honestly call yourself a QBasic programmer. That might not sound very prestigious, and you probably won't get a job in the real world by saying that, but ah well. QBasic is a fun and widespread language. But you might be wondering, what do I do now? My suggestion is to continue to learn another language. I would recommend Pascal if you are serious about programming because there are fundamental concepts that you still need to learn. There is also information which I have deliberately left out of this tutorial with the hope that I can teach you a style of programming which is becoming increasingly popular.
BASIC is an extremely popular language with thousands of different versions world-wide, so it is mandatory that you learn it. But if you will continue in programming, knowing a Mid-level DOS language will not suffice in the real world. I suggest learn ing some Pascal next, and then moving on to the world of Windows. When I say "learn" I do not mean memorize every command in the language, I mean "get familiar with the concepts." You may not learn how to do anything beyond what you can do in QBasic, bu t that's fine.