Visual Basic Script, derived from the programming language “Visual Basic”.
Excerpt from the article “Playing with VBScript: TBS Gladiators”:
Visual Basic Script (…) comes bundled with Windows operating systems -since about 1996-, and is part of Microsoft’s Visual Basic engine -year 1991 to 2008-.
Visual Basic was continued in the “dot net” (.NET) platform, being called “Visual Basic .NET” after Visual Basic reached its version 6 and was discontinued.
The Visual Basic Script code can be written without using additional programs, and as an interesting fact, the notepad can be used for this task.
Preliminary concepts.
VARIABLES.
They are elements that store information, either numerical values, or specific amounts of text.
We can store these data in a variable, to have them available throughout the program we are creating.
This is the case of games in which the characters lose money (variable to which cash amounts will be subtracted), or health when receiving physical damage (lives are subtracted or vitality is taken away), or gain points for playing well or performing specific tasks (points are added to the general score of that player).
All you have to do, is make up a word (or choose a letter) and tell Visual Basic Script that that word or letter is “worth something”. For example:
SUM = 20
a = c + b
Name = “Marcos”.
p = “hehehe”
Anyone who has used the “MEMORY” function on a pocket calculator will already be aware of how a variable works, having seen these simple examples.
In all cases, the variable is placed first, then the equals sign, then the value or text. If you are dealing with numbers or mathematical operations, these are written in the typical way, but if you are dealing with text, don’t forget to write it in quotation marks.
What not to do:
Do not use words with tilde or eñe… unfortunately, the Spanish language, has not been taken into account by the vbscript programmers.
Do not use spaces or symbols (except for the underscore “_” and the minus sign “-“, which are allowed).
Do not write words that are too long.
The following cases will lead to errors. Can you tell why?
a) Region = “Soriano”.
b) Departure time = 15:00:00
c) NumberOfStoriesInTheBrickBuildingOfTheConstructionCompanyInPandoCity = 6
d) Age = 25
e) Name = Mariana
f) Value = “38911
g) $uruguayos = 4000
Inputbox function
It is used to “ask a question” to the user, and “store its answer” in a variable.
Its “short form” is the following:
Inputbox (“”)
This has several problems and drawbacks:
The user’s answer will not be saved anywhere, even though the Inputbox will be displayed and perform part of its function.
Between the quotation marks, there should be a message that gives the user an idea of what is wanted. Otherwise, what question is it going to answer, when none has been asked?
You are not taking full advantage of the Inputbox’s capabilities.
To store the answer in a variable, you need to type the variable name, followed by an equals sign, and then develop the Inputbox function:
Question = Inputbox (“”)
Now that we know all this, it will be better to use its “almost complete form”, which consists of 3 parts:
Question – Title – “Default” answer (in that order).
Question = Inputbox (“Have you ever seen such a complete Inputbox?”, “Demonstration of the Inputbox command”, “Default answer”).
Why have we explained the “almost complete” version and not the “complete” version?
For several reasons.
Inputbox can also be told where on the screen to be positioned, which is totally inapplicable to other text display commands that are permanently used in vbscript, and also because Microsoft has not fully adapted the Inputbox function on operating systems after Windows XP, believe it or not. The Inputbox function was never well thought out or well constructed, therefore, we will only take advantage of what is really useful and discard what is wrong.
Solutions of the errors in the section “Variables”:
(a) The name of the variable, is written with tilde. Solution: rename it as “Region”.
b) The variable name contains spaces. Solution: rename it as Horse_is_real or Horseisreal.
c) The variable name is too long. It should be possible to replace it with a name of up to 15 characters, approximately (this is recommended).
d) The variable name contains the letter “ene” if you are coding in a language like Spanish. The tildes and the n are not considered in several programming languages. It is a pity, but it is the reality. Solution: rename the variable “Años” to “Anyos”, “Anios”, or something similar.
e) The text to be stored in the variable “Name” is not written between quotation marks, and will be taken as a numeric value. Remember: the text is “enclosed in quotation marks”; the numerical values are not.
f) Reverse case of case “e”. The number to be stored in the variable “Value” is being treated as text, because it has been written between quotation marks. 38911, will be taken as text, not as a number.
g) Case similar to cases “a” and “d”: the variable name contains unsuitable characters. Solution: we could replace the variable name.