02/03/22, 11:22 The Good Ol' Days of QBasic Nibbles :: The Coded Message

The Good Ol’ Days of QBasic Nibbles

2022-02-28 :: Jimmy Hartzell

#programming #historical #computers

Let’s talk about an ancient programming language! I think we can all

learn things from history, and it gives us grounding to realize that
our time is just one time among many, to see what people in the past
did differently, what they got wrong that we would never do now, and
also to see what they got right.

Do you remember MS-DOS? Do you remember that it came with an

interpreted programming language? From MS-DOS 5 onwards, it came with
not Python, not Javascript or R or Matlab, but a dialect of BASIC. But
I think most people, especially most people my age who were children at
the height of the MS-DOS era, remember it for the games, the two sample
programs that came with it, namely Gorillas and Nibbles (their name for
Snake).

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Nibbles is extra near and dear to my heart because not only is it the
game that I better enjoyed, but more interestingly because it’s the
first “large program” that I ever did work on (for me as a child,
“large” meant multiple subroutines), and the first existing program I
ever modified.

So recently, I tried to see if I could find it. And indeed, I could. I

just needed DosBox, the QBasic interpreter (you want QBasic EN 1.1), to
run it. After that, you just need the program itself, after which, you
can throw them in a directory, “mount” it from inside DosBox, and run
QBASIC.EXE and use its very discoverable interface (by 90’s
standards).

It looks a little less impressive in such a small little emulation

window, but of course at the time it took the entire screen of an
entire CRT monitor, and was the best technology available for me to
interact with.

Nibbles was a sample game designed for you to learn to program as well
as having fun with. True to its time, it had a little set-up interface
where you answered questions in a very basic prompt-and-respond TUI
before you could start playing:

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You ate numbers going from 1-9, which were easy to display – the
program, though a video game, runs in text mode! – but at the time I
just appreciated that it helped you keep track of how far along in the
level you were. So I decided to take a look at the code and discuss it
a little bit.

The first thing that struck me was how short it was – at 721 lines,
this is a rather short source file, a “simple” module or class, let
alone a whole program! I suppose things do seem bigger when you’re a
kid.

But also, I didn’t view it as one block of size-12 text on a high-

resolution monitor. I read it in QBasic’s built-in code browser where
it showed up as 14 different logically separate parts, at the time an
overwhelming number:

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And this is then what the subroutine would look like:

Code browsers are great, and this interface is a solid reminder that
subroutines are a very early form of modules, especially given that in
QBasic, these subroutines could contain their own sub-subroutines using
the more traditional GOSUB command.

So let’s talk about this programming language and program that once
people used to get real work (and real play) done.

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First off, we see some mutable global variables, a big no-no by modern
standards, but can you really blame them when their scope is no larger
than that of a small modern class, where the fields would be
effectively global within the context of an instance?

But also, to my pleasant surprise, there were also some global

constants, and they are marked as such, with the CONST keyword. In
fact, as we see in multiple places, QBasic is actually strongly typed,
sometimes even using the sigils, for which the BASIC family is
infamous.

The “B” in BASIC stands for “beginner,” and that is exactly the target
audience QBasic was designed for. So it’s really refreshing that in the
past they didn’t have this notion that types were too advanced for
novices, or perhaps too tedious, that an easy-to-learn programming
language wouldn’t have you declare them.

Or, of course, maybe duck-typing was seen as too difficult or

inefficient to implement. But in that case, why did they have what I
imagine would be an equally difficult compromise measure,
alphabetically-based type defaulting.

To be fair, for a long time I had no idea what DEFINT even meant, but
DEFINT A-Z certainly seemed like an appropriately mysterious and even
badass way to start a subroutine, a magical invocation, covering the
ends of the alphabet to start off each page of code.

Obviously, QBasic is not object oriented. Its fundamental notion of

module isn’t a class, but rather a subroutine or function. These two
notions were distinct: functions returned values (like in math) –
though they could also have side effects – and subroutines did not.
(Both had strongly-typed arguments, however).

This might seem an odd distinction to make, but it makes sense at a

certain level. Especially syntactically, subroutine calls
definitionally must be the top-level construct of a statement. And lo
and behold! – they do not require parentheses around their arguments
whereas functions do.

There’s really no reason not to do something like that in Rust, come to

think of it. And come to think of it, Haskell makes a vaguely similar
distinction, where if what others would call a “function” does IO and
does not take arguments, it’s not a function at all, but a special

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value known as an “action,” which can then only be called in certain

contexts.

So what did I do with this? I added more action keys. I added keys to
speed up and slow down gameplay on command, so that if you pressed the
arrow in the direction the snake was currently going, instead of doing
nothing, it sped up the snake. Pressing the opposite direction of where
you were going would then slow it down. And then, I wrote new levels,
using the existing levels code as a baseline.

And then, after that, I began to attack the main subroutine‘s main
loop. I thought it would be cool if multiple numbers could be on the
screen at the same time, but this required modifying how the location
of the numbers were stored, replacing the two variables indicating
their current location with a two-dimensional array of boolean values
(represented by 0 and -1 – integer/boolean distinctions were not
yet well-established).

I wish I still had the code. But more importantly, I’m grateful that
the Microsoft of the ’90s, as evil and monopolistic as it was, saw the
need to put a programming language, a little IDE, and some sample
programs and include them with their operating system. Bill Gates was
my hero when I was a small child – before I knew what anti-trust was –
and the fact that Microsoft made sure that computers came with plenty
of fun corridors for me to explore was a huge part of why.

But also, there was no particular reason why the stuff I was doing
couldn’t be done by any other elementary schooler, if there were
interest in the schools in teaching it. Variables in programming are
far more concrete in their meaning than variables in algebra – for one
thing, their values actually vary with time, which made me think the
variables in algebra were a bit of a misnomer.

And yet, programming isn’t even a required course in most American high
schools. And that, I think, is a real shame. I understand that most
schools don’t have the resources to do a good job of it, and that also,
honestly, is a real shame.

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