The Bean and I had a conversation on Monday evening about computers and networks and programming, the result of which was that he jumped out of bed and started designing a game.

I spent all day in London yesterday, gone before he got up and back after he'd gone to bed, but apparently he talked of little else. This morning he claims to have woken at half past five, because he couldn't stop thinking about his game. "Can I put it on a CD?" he asked, as I bleared my way downstairs.

I decided the only way to shut him up was to give him some code to play with. Sadly it seems that QBasic has been dropped, but 2 seconds of Googling lead me to a suitable replacement.

I started with a quick multiplication table¹:

10 print "Hello"
20 for i = 1 to 5
30   for j = 1 to 5
40     print i; " x "; j; " = "; i*j
50   next j
55   print "========"
60 next i 

10 print "Hello"
20 for i = 2 to 1000
30   for j = 1 to 100
40     print i; " - "; j; " = "; i+j
50   next j
55   print "========"
60 next i 

¹ Yes, line numbers. I'm old skool, me.
² The kids today just naturally adopt agile methods.

print i; " + "; j; " = "; i+j