Learn to Program with Small Basic

Helping Hands: IntelliSense and Syntax Coloring
If you’re following along and typing in Small Basic, you’ve seen how it analyzes
what you type, even before you finish the word. Small Basic offers a list
of suggestions that could help you complete what you’re typing. You can scroll
through this list by pressing the up and down arrows on your keyboard. Press
enter or double-click your selection to insert the highlighted text into your
code. This technology is called intelligent sense or IntelliSense for short. Use it to
speed up your typing time and reduce your syntax errors.
Tip
You can make IntelliSense transparent by just holding down the ctrl key to see your
code underneath it.
You might have also noticed that the Small Basic Editor used different
colors for some words in the program. This feature is called syntax coloring.
Keywords, which are reserved words with special meanings to Small Basic, are
shown in blue-purple. Strings, which are sequences of characters enclosed in
quotes, are orange, and so are numbers. Method names are dark red, object
names are blue-green, and so on. Syntax coloring helps you distinguish the
different parts of the code and makes your program easier to read. You’ll
learn more about these parts of code later in the book.
Drawing with Small Basic
The TextWindow object we used earlier works well for applications that don’t
have a graphical user interface (GUI), which is a user interface that contains
buttons, text boxes, and images, like Microsoft Word or Angry Birds (or
Angry Words). For example, you can use TextWindow to write applications
that perform math problems or that process data, where the input and output
use only characters (like text). This is called a text-based user interface.
If you want to create an application with a GUI (pronounced gooey, like a
candy bar), complete with buttons and images, you can use the Small Basic
library’s GraphicsWindow object. Using GraphicsWindow, you can create applications
that show buttons, images, and more for your users to interact with.
Let’s try it out!
Enter the program in Listing 1-2 into the Editor, and then click Run in
the Toolbar.
1 ' Graphic.sb
2 GraphicsWindow.DrawText(100, 50, "Greetings, Planet!")
Listing 1-2: Your first graphical program
Introducing Small Basic 9