When I was a lad I wrote programs in basic on my Sinclair ZX81, As I remember the lack of RAM on this revered ancestor limited any programs to about 10 lines. A subsequent upgrade to the Amstrad CPC offered more memory, and Locomotive Basic, with which I proceeded to write a Morse decoder. It actually worked - I was able to read a few shortwave radio morse messages from the French Navy in Toulon at one point.

Then a PC arrived and Borland's TurboBasic was the killer basic. When Borland stopped distributing it, the original creator, Bob Zale bought it back and renamed it Powerbasic.

Anyway, a couple of years back I bought a version to whip up a quick project demo, and saw that it was full of goodness as it did the job quickly without a steep learning curve.

Winding back to today, Powerbasic has released Version 9, and has added OOP among other things, so I've upgraded for fun and am presently poking around with it.

I just wish I'd had it on my ZX81...