quote:
There''s no shaking the basic ''accent.''

Hey! I learned on GWBASIC, and I had Quickbasic 4.5, and I have no such accent.

What about Qbasic, its free and it comes on your windows CD. It doesn''t compile like QuickBasic, but otherwise its very similar. Personally though, I would start your son out on java instead. Basic is archaic, and there are lots of free java ide''s at java.sun.com, including borland jbuilder and sun''s forte.

quote:Basic IS the way to learn to program. It''s far easier to learn
if a = b then
rather than
if (a := b) or something like that
you "can''t" get qbasic 4.5 for free. Though if you were to "accidentally" hit a few buttons and punch it into a search engine, a few downloads would pop up.

hey paladin, this is children_mcnuggets from XGP

actually in pascal, conditional statements are like if (a = b), only variables are assigned with :=
the conditional statements are pretty much the same as basic

personally, i''d teach him either C or Pascal, they are both great languages, c took me a little longer to grasp than pascal

freepascal.org used to have some links to some great IDE''s besides dev-pascal, but i cant seem to find them, i remember one having a look and feel of MSVC++, with the class browser and all

10 This hogwash about BASIC
20 causing programmers to form bad habits
30 is just a bunch of bologna.

Back to the subject of flavors of Basic for learning to program, if you're reading this message in Windows Internet Explorer, chances are your browser already supports VBScript for free. VBScript is essentially a scriptable subset of VB. Depending on the version of VBScript (IE4 = VBScript2, IE5 = VBScript5), VBScript5 supports classes.

Granted you will have to learn a little about DHTML too to get your programs working in a web page but that's no bad thing. I would recommend hiding DHTML from the pupil to start with by getting the pupil to code in an include file, perhaps using HTML form input and textareas for input and output. There's plenty of VBScript tutorials on the web. Microsoft's web site also has a script debugger.

Alternatively, you could take the same browser-based approach, but bite the bullet and choose java-script instead. This has the benefit of platform independence, better OO, more power, its a true web delivery platform supported by most browsers, and there's even more tutorials/samples on the web. If you are using Microsoft's IE and JScript you can still use Microsoft's script debugger.

You will need a text editor too, preferably one that displays what is the current line number, although you could use notepad at a push.

Not bad for free, and as well as gaining programming experience the pupil will also get a taste of web development.

Edited by - abstractworlds on November 15, 2001 6:36:02 AM

Can''t go wrong with a BBC micro.... as long as you like 15 colours (3 are flashing variations of the others), tape drives (and the wonderful block errors that come with them), discovering that your Arcadians game on tape is in fact a younger, more innocent version of you, singing "posta pat" and having to change the batteries to stop its memory from being wiped when the power dies....

--Cirian