QB successors

[stylin]

Hmm, it's hard to define a successor to QBasic, it having just an intepretter and all. I wouldn't call <= VB6, FreeBASIC, RealBASIC or any other similar projects successors really. </pedantic>

Now, I personally think FB is an excellent successor to QuickBASIC; I don't care if it will never compile 100% QB code. It still keeps pretty much all of the clunky and ugly syntax (unfortunately), plus it adds a plethora of new features. I haven't messed with <= VB6 very much, but from what I've seen it is also a fine replacement for QB - (I'm also a big fan of doing away with all the 'quirk' parts of the language, like VB.NET did).

Of course backwards-compatibility is not high on my list of requirements. When I wrote most of my QB code, I never used implicit variable declaration/type deduction, type suffixes and the like, so most of my old QB code compiles/runs in FB since v.15 (when I first discovered FB). I haven't found it difficult to port code that uses segments/offsets either, maybe I'm just a lucky bastard..

But PB is a compiled language, not pseudo compiled / interpreted like QB's language is, so it wasn't that obvious to make as good an IDE as QB.  Same thing for freebasic.  You'd almost have ot write a freebasic interpreter and that interpreter would have to follow FB's syntax closely on every release of Freebasic.  So to make that interpreter, might be a good idea to wait until the language is stable enough  (as in doesn't get changed anymore from a language perspective) then it might be possible to make an IDE that can work with the language atleast some.   

A full-fledged interpretter isn't necessary for things like Visual Studio's Intellisense™ and whatnot; QBASIC.EXE has very little "real-time editing info", I think it just keeps track of line-by-line syntax and variable/procedure references, IIRC (which is made easier by the fact that only procedures open new scopes; it's fairly accurate, but buggy), what could be integrated into a text editor fairly easily; variable/procedure references might be tricky - or not, now that periods are disallowed in identifiers (-lang fb) - but line-by-line syntax checking seems like it would be easy to support, and I don't think virtually any of the 'inherited' language from QB is going to change any time soon (much to my dismay).

Things like capitalization, spacing - style issues - are fluff that can be easily supported. Debugging would be a bit more involved, plus there are already excellent GUIs available for that (for free).

I guess if you need an IDE that supports that stuff (many QBers I chat with can't live without one for some reason, and believe me Visual Studio is my favorite when writing C++ code), then someone's just going to have to make/modify one already.