>qbasic? interesting... is it still in XP? > don't think so. i use ruby for just about any small task. > for instance it comes in handy when generating all kinds of lookup tables. > i suppose that's what eric uses qbasic for ? Unfortunately, QBasic (at least the version I have) seems to crash XP. I do a bunch of development using an old ThinkPad running Win98. And yes, I use QBasic (and 1-2-3) for whacking together lookup tables. (The mazes for Skeleton were randomly generated using QBasic.) It's my favorite quick & dirty language. Probably because it was the first programming language I learned. Irfanview and MS Paint for graphics.