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Comment by gauravphoenix | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why the VB was named so? it had nothing to do with BASIC language. The wiki page says "Visual Basic was derived from BASIC" but I don't recall it being anything remotely close to BASIC. Or am I recollecting things wrongly? It has been 30 years :)

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For some reason another poster with the correct answer was downvoted here. VisualBasic was indeed based on Microsoft's QuickBasic (and QBasic).

Microsoft even released VisualBasic for DOS which was QuickBasic with a text mode UI component.

VB was based on QuickBASIC which introduced structured programming constructs and made line numbers optional. Many BASIC statements, such as PRINT and INPUT, had to be eliminated or changed because they were meaningless in the GUI world. But the fundamentals of Microsoft BASIC as it existed in the early 90s are still there.

VB does have PRINT, it causes text to be drawn on the form. It's not very useful, but it is there.

I must've been confusing it with Access VBA, which doesn't appear to support PRINT except in the debugger. Print # is supported for file I/O however.

I wrote a long form history of Visual Basic[0] awhile back that covers the origin of the product and how it ended up being married to BASIC at Microsoft.

tl;dr: VB started out as a project called "Tripod" (later "Ruby"), written by Alan Cooper (of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" fame) and a small team of developers. It was originally a Windows shell construction set, but Alan sold it to Microsoft where it languished on the shelf for awhile.

Bill Gates eventually decided that he wanted to marry the visual UI building aspect with BASIC and handed the project off to Scott Ferguson and the Business Languages Group, who were maintaining Microsoft's QuickBASIC IDE, the BASIC compiler, and developing a new language engine (dubbed Embedded Basic) for inclusion in a relational database product codenamed Omega (which would go on to become Microsoft Access).

[0] https://retool.com/visual-basic/

It was BASIC, just one that had evolved quite far from really old school BASIC. I like to probably incorrectly think that AmigaBASIC (also written by MS) was a bit of a half way point between old 8bit BASIC and VB. It did away with line numbers, got a bit more event driven, and added a lot of GUI stuff like mouse handling, windows, menus etc etc etc.

Lots of its features come from BASIC, like "on error goto" (even though it now worked with labels rather than line numbers). It is a more structured kind of BASIC than many of its predecessors, but procedures and functions have appeared in earlier BASICs such as BBC BASIC, or I think later versions of QuickBASIC.

Been a long time since I played with VB but I think you could still use line numbers if you wanted but you had to have everything numbered?

There were a whole bunch of these 'structured' basic dialects in the mid/late-80s that fused Pascal-ish syntax elements with BASIC and made line numbers optional. QuickBasic was a predecessor to VB, of course... but GFA Basic was one I used on the Atari ST, there was MacBASIC on the Mac, AMOS/STOS on the Amiga & Atari ST, etc. etc.

Pretending to improve something established? I’d say that about the C# naming.

Or JavaScript, which only has Java in the name because another popular language at the time did.

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