GW-BASIC, Visual Basic

Its great that GW-BASIC has been open sourced but I don't think anything is going to come from it. Its pure assembly code that is meant to run at the kernel level. And with projects like QB64 already continuing Microsofts much superior BASIC variant I don't see who will be using this source for much more than to study. It is important to preserve this code though so from that point of view its awesome.

As for Visual Basic, Microsoft hasn't really provided much support for it for years now. I used VBA for automation in my last job and I can definitely say that it is far from stable. It also has this annoying feature of prioritizing context over syntax. If they open source that I think it would be more useful as the community could improve the numerous flaws in that language.

Does anyone really think that Microsoft is expecting this code to be used as a base for another project? This is part of computer HISTORY and it's interesting from this point of view.

Visual Basic,on the other hand, is still being used and the chances that Microsoft will show its code in the near future are close to zero. Also, showing the code and letting others to use this code are two different things.

Yeah, you know that, but you're still talking about Microsoft open sourcing Visual Basic source code and allowing anyone to use/modify it like it was possible. Plus you're calling open sourcing GW-BASIC useless. Would you call displaying old cars/planes/steam engines "useless"? And then you say that, of course, you didn't mean what you meant. Beyond parody. :-)

Just read my posts again. Slowly and use the dictionary this time.