What software does a novice need to learn to write and run math analysis programs?

Reply #40

Domeman — Wed, 18 May 2011 17:26:28 GMT

There is PureBasic.

http://www.purebasic.com/index.php

Reply #39

JosephusMinimus — Mon, 02 May 2011 13:24:37 GMT

Welcome advice phileight. I'll follow it. Thanks.

Reply #38

phileight — Mon, 02 May 2011 01:55:48 GMT

Joseph

being able to write programs to do what you want opens lots of possibilities. Don't worry about writing perfect code. start with a small task , then expand on it. if you work at it, in six months you'll dump most of what you have done because you will have found a better way to do it. use the rem statement generously to explain what you are doing. months later you will forget what a particular bit of code was intended to do.

if there is is a command you don't understand, ask, if you... [ More ]

Reply #37

time*treat — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:54:27 GMT

Heh, yeah, there's a whole lot of undocumented stuff in XL -- one of the older versions even has a flight simulator.

Reply #36

garyo1954 — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:20:36 GMT

Thank you CARBOB! I hope a few people got some benefit out of it. Judging from the number of times it was downloaded several people are interested in finding a way to put their ideas in a form they can use. I'm happy to see that.

With a few changes the same routing will give percentages or the hi/lo and even/odd combinations. And conditions cam be added to show how many numbers would have to be played to cover any sum range. Let me get caught up on what I have going and I'll pull that togethe... [ More ]

Reply #35

JosephusMinimus — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:52:55 GMT

A lot of the time it's just a matter of putting the right information in a search engine, which is one of my shortcomings. I just found this: http://williams.best.vwh.net/avform.htm and it's offering some hope some of what I thought I'd have to program to do has already been done in EXCEL. It won't keep me from starting to learn to program but it provides an alternative on an immediate problem

Reply #34

JosephusMinimus — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:41:42 GMT

No problem CARBOB. Glad to see I'm not the only one getting benefits from all the help being offered up.

Reply #33

CARBOB — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:52:29 GMT

Josephus,

Hope, I'm not intruding, thanks for the thread. Garyo, copied your examples, thank you. It has been over 30 years, since I have done any programming. I hope that some of my learning will return and not lost forever.

Reply #32

garyo1954 — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:09:05 GMT

Josephus,

My pleasure. If there is anything you need, let us know. There is plenty of good people here willing to assist.

G

Reply #31

JosephusMinimus — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:58:51 GMT

Hi Time*treat. There's a good chance the shortcoming is mine rather than EXCEL's. A lot of what I do isn't within the range of probabilities anyone else would want to do them. But the websites have been a lot of help, though several times in the past had email exchanges with some of the people who help on the sites explaining what I was trying to do. Those ultimately ended with the helpers deciding they didn't know how to do it, either.

But EXCEL definitely has a lot of capabilities beyond wh... [ More ]

Reply #30

JosephusMinimus — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:50:03 GMT

Thanks a bunch Gary. I've copied, pasted everything you said and downloaded the file.

I owe you.

Reply #29

garyo1954 — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:17:05 GMT

Finally, if we open out sumdata.dat file in notepad it will show the total number of draws, the low sum, the high sum and the percentages of hits from the total draws. From there we can open them in Excel to manipulate it in any way we choose. The sumdata file will look like this

Reply #28

time*treat — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:12:41 GMT

I have found things I wanted to do in XL that weren't explained in any of the books I have for it (the web was helpful in those cases) -- but I've not yet run into anything it couldn't actually do, in the number-crunching arena.

Reply #27

garyo1954 — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:08:53 GMT

I apologize again for getting anal but it is essential for a novice, as the title of the thread suggests, to understand the components in a program and what they are doing.

Here's our program broken into sections with explanation:

The first three lines clear the screen (CLS). The REM statement is a reminder of what the program is designed to do. The A$ through E$ is data I want printed to the screen to make the output understandable. Otherwise I would have a bunch of meaningless numbers fl... [ More ]

Reply #26

garyo1954 — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:21:36 GMT

Josephus,

I've been sitting in the background watching. It is interesting to see the many flavors of BASIC. I'm not familiar with JustBasic, NBasic, or FreeBASIC. It appears they have some minor difference but the language conventions are the same.

It sounds like what you want to do is what I do now. I derive my data by program and then take it into Excel to juggle, flip-flop, manipulate, investigate, inspect, detect, and look over. Like RL, I try to keep my programs uniform so parts can b... [ More ]

Reply #25

JosephusMinimus — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:42:46 GMT

Thanks RJOH: You're a master of understatement. EXCEL is great for a lot of things and learning to do anything on it has always been a time-consuming labor for me. It's possible a lot of what I want to do that I don't believe EXCEL is capable of could be done using a db system, but I'm afraid it would be trading a headache for an upset stomach.

But a lot of the problem for me with EXCEL is that it's a memory hog and I find with the large files I work with I run out of RAM before I run out of... [ More ]

Reply #24

RJOh — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:11:56 GMT

Learning EXCEL or a computer language well enough to do all the things it's capable of doing takes time and some effort, good luck on what ever you decide to do.

Reply #23

RL-RANDOMLOGIC — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:02:49 GMT

Josephus

I have borland turbo C++, VB3 vb4, vbnet, qbx, qb45, Python, and QB64 all on my computer but I use QB64

99% of the time. I am not looking to produce consumer grade apps and as far a crunching numbers qb64

does anything/everything I need. I have a toolbox with tons of subs and functions that I have written over

the years that I can copy and paste. When I get a new Idea to test I can code it minuets and be on my way.

What you need depends on where you want to end up. If yo... [ More ]

Reply #22

jbgmarker — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:45:57 GMT

You guys, especially those that use QB, might want to look at FreeBasic.

It is open source, has a true compiler, is compatible with QB, has a forum etc.

In fact it has software switches to compile QB programs.

I have used it to compile QB programs with no problems.

It is fast, much faster that QB.

I believe, but not posttive, that it uses an open source C compiler behind its Basic front end.

It also, unlike QB64 the last I looked, doesn't use a Bunch of dependent files to work.... [ More ]

Reply #21

JosephusMinimus — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:25:29 GMT

Thanks RL. When I asked this question I assumed there was a single, simple answer more better than other answers. I figured I'd get a little nudge in a direction I'd follow step by step in my own plodding way until I could program the computer to do some things I can't do, EXCEL can't do, or EXCEL can do but I just never figured out how to make it do it.

I can see I was looking for over-simplifications and a lot of roads lead to Rome.

I appreciate your post.

Reply #20

RL-RANDOMLOGIC — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 02:01:57 GMT

josephus

Just giving some examples of the syntax

RL

Reply #19

RJOh — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 01:42:50 GMT

I down loaded that NBasic and may give it a try. NBasic has a lot more commands than GWBasic ever had. I haven't used any of the graphic commands in GWBasic for years so I don't remeber if they are similar or not. I did notice NBasic had a command DAY which calculate the day of any date and in my GWBasic programs I had to write a routine to do that.

Looks like NBasic has enough commands to run any of the older Basic programs on the newer machines. Thanks for sharing.

I agree one should kno... [ More ]

Reply #18

JosephusMinimus — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:31:14 GMT

Thanks pick4hawk

Reply #17

JosephusMinimus — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:30:22 GMT

RL: My EXCEL donealready does square roots.

Reply #16

pick4hawk — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:30:40 GMT

There is a program called Nbasic for windows that uses line numbers. Sort of like Gw-basic for Dos.

However there is another program called Powerbasic for windows that is way better then QB basic for windows.

It is all in what you personally feel is easy to use. The C language is what they teach in school these days.

Personally, I feel C is very lengthy to do anything. They teach Pascal conventions but in the C language.

Powerbasic does have a user forum. It s best you know what you

Reply #15

RL-RANDOMLOGIC — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:09:06 GMT

Added DIM SQROOT AS DOUBLE for more accuracy for larger numbers.

SCREEN _NEWIMAGE(960, 648, 256):

_TITLE MY FIRST PROGRAM IN QB64

COLOR 79, 79

DIM SQROOT AS DOUBLE

CALCSQR:

CLS

COLOR 0, 79

LOCATE 1, 2: INPUT ENTER NUMBER TO CALCULATE SQ-ROOT , SQROOT

LOCATE 2, 2: PRINT THE SQUARE ROOT OF ; SQROOT; = ; SQROOT ^ .5

LOCATE 4, 2: PRINT PRESS (E) TO EXIT OR (N) FOR NEXT

DO

_LIMIT 200

CMD1$ = RIGHT$(INKEY$, 1)

CMD1$ = UCASE$(CMD1$)

IF CMD1

Reply #14

RL-RANDOMLOGIC — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:50:38 GMT

another quick program to calculate the sq-root of a number

SCREEN _NEWIMAGE(960, 648, 256):

_TITLE MY FIRST PROGRAM IN QB64

COLOR 79, 79

CALCSQR:

CLS

COLOR 0, 79

LOCATE 1, 2: INPUT ENTER NUMBER TO CALCULATE SQ-ROOT , SQROOT

LOCATE 2, 2: PRINT THE SQUARE ROOT OF ; SQROOT; = ; SQROOT ^ .5

LOCATE 4, 2: PRINT PRESS (E) TO EXIT OR (N) FOR NEXT

DO

_LIMIT 200

CMD1$ = RIGHT$(INKEY$, 1)

CMD1$ = UCASE$(CMD1$)

IF CMD1$ = E THEN EXIT DO

IF CMD1

Reply #13

RL-RANDOMLOGIC — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:35:54 GMT

Same code without annotation

SCREEN _NEWIMAGE(960, 648, 256):

_TITLE MY FIRST PROGRAM IN QB64

COLOR 79, 79

CLS

COLOR 0, 79

LOCATE 1, 2: PRINT HELLO

LOCATE 2, 2: PRINT PRESS Q TO EXIT

DO

_LIMIT 200

CMD1$ = RIGHT$(INKEY$, 1)

CMD1$ = UCASE$(CMD1$)

IF CMD1$ = Q THEN EXIT DO

LOOP

SYSTEM

RL

Reply #12

RL-RANDOMLOGIC — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:22:33 GMT

Josephus

When using QB64 the first thing to do is set the display size. Click options then display then set the width and

hight to set the size of the IDE window. I set mine to Width =140 Hight = 46

COPY AND PASTE THIS CODE INTO THE PROGRAM AND CLICK RUN THEN CLICK MAKE EXE ONLY

YOU NOW HAVE YOUR FIRST qb64 PROGRAM

SCREEN _NEWIMAGE(960, 648, 256): 'SET PROGRAM WINDOW SIZE IN PIXELS

_TITLE MY FIRST PROGRAM IN QB64 'ADD A TITLE

COLOR 79, 79 'SET FORGROUND BACKGROUND COL... [ More ]

Reply #11

JosephusMinimus — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:16:40 GMT

Thanks a bunch Lantern. Good to see you posting. I haven't noticed any posts by you for a while.

I'll do the download.

But I'm also figuring to download the others people suggested. I got the QB 64 but haven't set the world on fire with it yet. Shortly after I successfully downloaded it I decided to take another shot downloading Expert Lotto and it came through uncorrupted also, so I'll probably play around with it some before I try writing programs.

I noticed a few minutes ago the ele... [ More ]

Reply #10

LANTERN — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:19:44 GMT

Why don't you take a good look at my blog, I wrote some beginners stuff there, I know next to nothing about BASIC, but after reading and posting about it for a few short days I just finished making this, the download link is only good for 7 days:

http://wikisend.com/download/601206/Fernando%27sCalculator1.00.exe

That is very old basic like it was used on the Altair's computers, those computers that were bigger than a refrigerator, but is the same old basic as also used on the Commodore 64... [ More ]

Reply #9

jimmy4164 — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 04:31:36 GMT

For a beginner, I would second Ramijami's motion for JustBasic.

It runs under Windows independent of DOS/CMD considerations, and they make it very easy to output graphs and charts.

http://www.justbasic.com

Have fun

Reply #8

JosephusMinimus — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:46:06 GMT

QB 64 loaded fine. Reminds me of looking at an old MSDOS startup screen. I'm going to copy/paste the wheel program JadeLottery posted on his thread into it and see what happens.

I feel like a kid with a new toy. Thanks a bunch, all of you.

Reply #7

JosephusMinimus — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:22:02 GMT

Ramijami, Time*treat and JadeLottery: Thanks to all of you. I just spent 2 hours downloading QB as per Gary's suggestion [dialup and 23 mg download]. I haven't loaded it yet so I don't know if it came through uncorrupted. Long downloads and a lousy phone line here have a way of getting corrupted on a windy or wet day.

[Probably not the fault of the phone company - one night I shot the phone line in two by accident running off cows gathered around the house. Spliced it back together with 12/2... [ More ]

Reply #6

JADELottery — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:00:53 GMT

QuickBASIC is a good place to start.

It's what I use to do my first programming.

But, if you have Windows, it may be better to go with Visual Basic.

You can download the free version at http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#2010-Visual-Basic

Reply #5

time*treat — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 19:33:43 GMT

If you are writing macros, you are already programming in a flavor of BASIC.

There are a number of other languages that have come along since then -- the differences being their ease of use and best purposes.

There's plenty of free example code online, for you to see which language(s) you prefer.

When you are ready to move on to books, I'd start with Learn ___ in 24 Hours or Learn ___ in 21 Days .

If you go with an edition older than the current one, you can also save a buck or two... [ More ]

Reply #4

Ramijami — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 19:26:26 GMT

Josephus,

I use JustBasic, found it to be the easiest to learn, very good tutorial to get you started, and extremely helpful members in the forum should you have any programming specific related queries.....you can google justbasic.

Reply #3

JosephusMinimus — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:47:50 GMT

Thanks Gary. I'll do it.

Reply #2

garyo1954 — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 15:53:12 GMT

Josephus,

Download QB64. It's a 32/64 bit version of the original BASIC reworked by an internet poster named Galleon. It will run on XP/VISTA/Win7.

The home page will point you to the forums where you can download it and the wiki documentation. Almost all the original BASIC language has been implemented.

It looks and performs the same as QB4.5 or QBASIC 7.1, which you could still get. But don't bother. You would have to install a program called DOSBOX to run those. Not worth it.... [ More ]

Reply #1

JosephusMinimus — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:57:55 GMT

I should probably add that I thought I could figure this out on my own, which is how I usually do things. But the more I've read on the recent threads about how people learned to program, what they use for compiling, what programs they used when they were learning and what they try to do now the more clear it becomes to me that I'd save myself a lot of effort by asking directly for advice from people who know what they're talking about.

What software does a novice need to learn to write and run math analysis programs?

JosephusMinimus — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:21:58 GMT

I've never written a program but I'd like to try learn how to write simple ones and use them. I see these codes posted by JadeLottery, RL and others on the threads and I have no idea how to make any use of them or run them on my computer.

I know just enough to create macros to do some of what I want to do on EXCEL and text editors.

What software do I need to acquire to run the codes you post here? What software do you recommend for a beginner to learn to write code to analyze, compile and... [ More ]