Visual Basic

Discussion of Microsoft VisualBasic on this site is often split between...

VbClassic = versions 3 through 6 of the product; COM based
VisualBasicDotNet = versions 7 and on; as part of the .NET initiative; integrated with the CommonLanguageRuntime.

For information common to VbClassic and VisualBasicDotNet, please refer to the new MicrosoftBasic page.

Regarding other forms of BASIC...

If there is "visual" Basic, that would imply there might also be AuditoryBasic? and BrailleBasic?.

Absolutely. Sadly, amateur historians like me might guess that that the "visual" name comes from the 1980s trend towards "visual" IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironment s (spearheaded by SmalltalkBrowsers? such as the SystemBrowser?, and InterfaceBuilder) and ClassBasedLanguages?. VB was preceded by VisualSmalltalk, VisualAge, and perhaps many others, such that by 1991, it seems that "visual" was strongly bound to expensive windowing development environments for professional programmers. Prior to VB, most (if not all) BASICs did not have windowing IDEs, nor classes, and were manipulated with a ReadEvalPrintLoop at a text terminal. This text interaction has probably been controlled many times with a Braille terminal , and with a speech synthesizer and speech recognition. Therefore, I guess that Auditory BASIC and Braille BASIC are as prosaic as REPL BASIC development environments with accessible human interfaces.

It appears from this article, http://apcmag.com/now_the_blind_can_program_in_net.htm , that the visual programming revolution has left some people so far behind that you can win an award in 2007 for giving them access to 1980s technology. I just started AccessibleDevelopmentEnvironments to discuss this.