I’ve been writing an interpreter for QBasic for quite some time now, since March 28th to be precise. This was something I always wanted to do. In the process, I am learning Rust, which I like a lot. But, as I implement feature after feature, I am learning QBasic as well, especially things a developer normally never has to worry about.

Dynamic Typing? Nope

The first misconception I had was that QBasic is a dynamic typed language. In Ruby, you can do the following:

i = 42
puts i
i = "is the answer"
puts i

The variable i gets first the numeric value 42 and then the string value “is the answer”.

In QBasic, that doesn’t work. You can’t re-assign a variable to a different type. In fact, it goes a bit beyond that. The name of the variable dictates the type of values it can hold.

A = 42      ' works
A = "oops"  ' does not work

In my interpreter, rusty basic, I refer to these variable names as bare. They consist of just letters and optionally numbers, e.g. A, B, Age, MysteriousVariable42.

Side note: I figured out variable names in QBasic can also contain dots for crying out loud, which I haven’t supported yet.

By default, bare names hold float values of single precision. So the assignment A = 42 is actually creating a single value. To create a different variable, we need to use what I call in rusty basic a qualified name: a variable name followed by a type qualifier. There are five such characters:

  • % declares an integer
  • & declares a long
  • ! declares a single (which is the default)
  • # declares a double
  • $ declares a string

Some examples:

A% = 42
B& = 5653376574648
C! = 3.14
D# = 45644564.3353
E$ = "hello world"

When coding the interpreter, I often worry about edge cases. Things that a developer wouldn’t normally do, but out of curiosity I dive into. An example is, what would happen if I define the same variable name with different type qualifiers:

A% = 42
A$ = "the answer"
PRINT A%, A$

Will the above program work? Turns out it works just fine, as far as QBasic is concerned, A% and A$ are two different variables.

Default type resolution

I mentioned that a bare variable holds a single float value by default. Consider the following program:

A = 41
A! = A! + 1
PRINT A

It prints 42. As the A variable is a single, it is resolved to A!. A and A! are the same variable.

It is possible to change the default type to one of the other 4 types with the keywords DEFINT (for integers), DEFLNG (for longs), DEFDBL (for doubles) and DEFSTR (for strings). There’s also of course DEFSNG for singles. In fact, in the games that came with QBasic, Gorillas and Nibbles, the first statement in the game is:

' Set default data type to integer for faster game play
DEFINT A-Z

The above statement says that any variable that starts with a letter between A and Z (so all variables) is an integer. I don’t know why integers aren’t the default to begin with, might be some backwards compatibility issue with an even older BASIC flavor.

If we use this statement in the above program:

DEFINT A-Z
A = 41
A! = A! + 1
PRINT A

It will print 41 instead. Now we have two variables A (which is now an integer, so A%) and A!.

In rusty-basic, I have a layer called “linting” which sits between getting the parse tree and generating instructions. Among other things, the linter makes sure that all bare names are resolved to qualified names and that there are no mismatch types or duplicate definitions.

Making it more complicated: DIM A AS STRING

I’m currently in the process of implementing the DIM statement. With DIM, you can declare a variable without an assignment. It’s even possible to declare arrays and user defined types, but I haven’t gone that far in implementation.

There’s two ways you can declare a variable with DIM. The one is exactly the same as seen so far:

DIM A
DIM A$
A = 42
PRINT A!
A$ = "the answer"
PRINT A$

The program works fine. The variable A is a bare variable resolved to a single (so it’s the same as A!) and A$ is a different variable.

It gets complicated when using the second way of declaring a variable:

DIM A AS INTEGER
A = 42
PRINT A

The keywords that match the five data types are INTEGER, LONG, SINGLE, DOUBLE and STRING.

For the lack of a better name, I call this an extended variable (naming things is hard) while I call the variables seen earlier as compact. It’s important to flag this as something special in the interpreter because it follows different naming resolution rules.

An extended variable cannot coexist with other variables of the same bare name. The following throw a duplicate definition error:

Trying to use the same extended variable with different type (this one makes sense):

DIM A AS INTEGER
DIM A AS STRING

Trying to use an extended integer with a bare compact (which should be single):

DIM A AS INTEGER
DIM A

Trying to use an extended integer with a compact string:

DIM A AS INTEGER
DIM A$

Trying to use an extended integer with an implicit compact string on assignment:

DIM A AS INTEGER
A$ = "hello"

Side note: every such edge case discovery has become a unit test in rusty basic.

You could argue at least the latter might be something the interpreter should allow, given it allows it for compact style variables, but it doesn’t.

The next difference is that A now is resolved to A% (as it declared as an integer), bypassing the default type resolution rules:

DIM A AS INTEGER
A% = 42
PRINT A

So it’s still possible to use a type qualifier, as long as it matches the type declared at the DIM statement.

Again, these are all probably things that a developer wouldn’t do. It would be also tempting on my side to just say “a variable must be unique, throw an error otherwise” and call it a day. But I’m curious to discover how it is supposed to work.