True BASIC/4d/Star Pattern/01

I went looking for the source code from my first ever C program (a screen saver). I couldn’t find it, but instead I found the homework exercises from my first ever computer programming class in high school. They are all written in a BASIC flavor called True BASIC.

This class was taught by an aging math teacher who liked playing bridge and Go with his students after school - he was kind of a classic late-20th-century US nerd figure, with glasses and maybe, like, a pocket protector. I guess he’s probably not still around anymore, which is sad to realize. He always liked me and encouraged me to keep learning about computers. I didn’t really understand that I was lucky to get that kind of encouragement.

I remember this class being way too easy for me at the time. The most complicated thing in it was a quicksort implementation.

A more typical exercise was this:

REM Program: True BASIC/4d/Star Pattern/01         5/5
REM Purpose: To print a pattern of stars:
REM                *
REM                **
REM                ***
REM                ****
REM              for 40 rows and then go in reverse:
REM                40 *s
REM                39 *s
REM Author: Eli Thorkelson
REM Date: 14 Mar 1997
REM These are the opening statements
PRINT "                        StarPattern 1.0"
PRINT "                       By Eli Thorkelson"
PRINT ""
PRINT ""
PRINT "                    Press any key when ready"
GET KEY useless                   !This variable is useless
REM Beginning of the first FOR-NEXT loop
REM           This loop prints the first half of the *s
FOR step1 = 1 to 40
    PRINT ""                      ! This moves to the next line
    FOR step2 = 1 to step1
        PRINT "*";
    NEXT step2
NEXT step1
REM Beginning of the second FOR-NEXT loop
REM           This loop prints the second half of the *s
FOR step1 = 40 to 1 step -1
    PRINT ""                      ! Moves to the next line
    FOR step2 = 1 to step1
        PRINT "*";
    NEXT step2
NEXT step1

I haven’t looked at this language in such a long time. I like the nested loop implementations. It’s both clumsy and oddly easy to read.

My favorite line, clearly, is GET KEY useless !This variable is useless, although it should really have read !This comment is useless since the variable name is already self-documenting. Perhaps unused would have been a better name than useless, though.

I tried to figure out how to execute this program. I managed to get some of it to run on qbjs.org. I had to shorten it to ten lines instead of 40, and remove the confirmation step.

                        StarPattern 1.0
                       By Eli Thorkelson


*
**
***
****
*****
******
*******
********
*********
**********
**********
*********
********
*******
******
*****
****
***
**
*

I honestly have no idea why this was even a homework exercise. I guess it assesses whether we could write nested loops. Or maybe our teacher just liked seeing stars.