Qbasic Tutorial - QBasic for Beginners - Chapter 1 (2024)

Chapter I

Basic Commands

When you open QBasic, you see a blue screen where you can type your program.
Let’s begin with the basic commands that are important in any program.

PRINT

Command PRINT displays text or numbers on the screen.
The program line looks like this:

Type the highlighted text into QBasic and press F5 to run the program. On the screen you’ll see:

 You must put the text in quotes, like this – "text". The text in quotes is called a string. If you put the PRINT alone, without any text, it will just put an empty line. PRINT can also put numbers on the screen. PRINT 57 will show the number 57. This command is useful for displaying the result of mathematical calculations. But for calculations, as well as for other things in the program, you need to use variables.

Variables

When you think, you keep words or numbers in your mind. This allows you to speak and to make calculations. QBasic also needs to keep words or numbers in its memory. To do this, you use variables, pieces of QBasic memory, which can keep information. A variable can be named with any letter, for example – a. It can also have a longer name, which can be almost any word. It is important to know that there are two main types of variables – that keep a number and that keep a word or a string of words.

 Numeric variables. It’s basically variables named with just a letter or a word. You tell this variable to keep a number like this:

In other words, you assigned the value 15 to the variable a.
QBasic will now know that the variable named a keeps the number 15. Now, if you type:

and run the program, the computer will show this number on the screen.

String variables can keep so called "strings", which is basically any text or symbols (like % or £), which you put in the quotes "". You can also put numbers in a string variable, but again, you must include them in quotes, and QBasic will think that those numbers are just a part of text. The string variables look like this – a$. The $ sign tells QBasic that this variable contains text.

Example:

On the screen you’ll see:

The PRINT command can print more that one string on the line. To do this, put the ; sign between the variables. For example, you have two variables – name$, which contains name Rob, and age, which contains the number 34. Then, to print both name and age, you type:

As you can see, the name of a variable can be more than just one letter – it can be a short word which describes what sort of information does this variable keep.

What you see on the screen when you run the program will look like this:

Or, you can type the program like that:

The result is:

INPUT

INPUT is a command that allows you or anybody else who runs the program to enter the information (text or number) when the program is already running. This command waits for the user to enter the information and then assigns this information to a variable. Since there are two types of variables, the INPUT command may look like this – INPUT a (for a number), or INPUT a$ (for a string).
Example (Type this program into QBasic and run it by pressing F5)

The END command tells QBasic that the program ends here.

You don’t have to use PRINT to ask the user to enter the information. Instead, you can use

and the result will be the same.

GOTO

Quite often you don’t want the program to run exactly in the order you put the lines, from the first to the last. Sometimes you want the program to jump to a particular line. For example, your program asks the user to guess a particular number:

The program then checks if the entered number is correct. But if the user gives the wrong answer, you may want to let him try again. So you use the command GOTO, which moves the program back to the line where the question is asked. But first, to show QBasic where to go, you must "label" that line with a number:

Then, when you want the program to return to that line, you type

You can use GOTO to jump not only back but also forward, to any line you want. Always remember to label that line. You can have more than one label, but in that case they should be different.