Basic and Visual Basic - For Easy Programming

Invented in 1964 by Kemeny and Kurtz to be usable by anyone, the name is acronym of "Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". The interpreted version has been widely used with first personal computers, including the first PC from IBM. Bill Gates won a contest with its version. The old versions have line numbers and goto instruction to these line numbers.
Visual Basic has been created by Microsoft in 1991 and succeeds to Basica and QBasic. It is aimed at Windows applications and manage events (as mouse clics).
Visual Basic .Net (Visual Basic 7) is a new language, object oriented, running under the .Net framework.

Features

Visual Basic is object oriented and no longer uses line numbers to call subroutines... The language remains simple to learn. It has not the power of C++, Pascal, or Java.
But Visual Basic .Net is near C++ for the power.

Why to use Visual Basic?

This was an easy to learn language, and successfully for this reason in the past. Now Python, Ruby and Scriptol are the simplest to use. If you want to program Microsoft's applications by scripts, learning Basic is also useful.
Visual Basic .Net is a replacement for C# under .Net.

Sites and tools

• Visual Basic
  Microsoft sells this port included into the Visual Studio package. The 6 version is intended to have more power.
• XBasic
  A free compiler.
• Free Basic
  Another basic compiler, near Quick Basic, with additions. GambasFor Linux only, open source compiler.

Sample code

10 PRINT "Hello, World!"
20 END

Public Class MyApplication
  Shared Sub Main()
  MessageBox.Show("Hello World!", "HELLO WORLD")
  End Sub
End Class

10 INPUT "Enter two numbers, separated by a comma:", A, B
20 LET SUM = A + B 
30 LET DIFF = A - B
40 LET MUL = A * B 
50 PRINT "The sum is ", SUM 
60 PRINT "The difference is ", DIFF 
70 PRINT "The product is ", MUL
80 END