FreeBasic

For Basic programs, I'll be using FreeBasic, at least until I'm motivated to do otherwise. (Say, if I discover that it sucks.) You can download it at the link, install it, and then invoke the compiler with "fbc".

If you see "Old Basic", that means we're dealing with some ancient stuff. GOTOs and line numbers, and probably ALL CAPS. (I won't type things in as all caps, though, because I find that tedious.)

To compile an "Old Basic" program, you'd enter:

fbc -lang qb progname.bas

The "-lang qb" is to imitate QBasic, which is the oldest extant dialect that I know of that will work with these dinosaurs.

Now, there's some advantage to using actual QBASIC: Old Basics were all interpreted--you had to pay big money for a compiler, which is why I learned assembler (time was cheap, money was dear). What that meant though, was that if your program crashed, you could look at it real time, fix it and go on. (This was somewhat unreliable, though, since certain actions would silently reset the variable pool.)

QB, I think, has the stop-n-go thing, but I'm not sure about that. It does interacively debug, though, and that can be a huge help in learning how the flow of a program actually works.

For now, though, I'm going to stick with FreeBasic. If I find a use for QB, I'll bring it up again.