Ashwin is a doof. But that's not what this page is really about. Nor does it have anything to do with driver education classes. Quite the contrary, infact. I have a program to sell to you. Not in the sense of actually convincing you to buy it, but in the sense of convincing you to download it. It's pretty pointless actually, but hear me out. Or just go back to my summer plans. Either is fine with me.
It's written in QBasic, that vestige of DOS days long past. It has a use, and could be very useful in a few situations that have never actually arisen.
BASECONV.BAS is a program designed to convert between number systems. As you might rember learning in middle or high school math classes, most of us use base 10. Computers use base 2, and programmers often talk to computers in base 16, which is also called hexadecimal. So far, those are the only numerical bases that have real uses with us.
However, consider the reason we use base 10. It is because we have ten fingers, an arbitrary function of evolution. However, should we ever encounter intelligent life outside this little ball of gloom that is our earth, they will probably not have ten fingers.
As such, we will need a way to convert our numbers to theirs if we want to communicate. The base conversion algorithm presented in BASECONV.BAS is one solution to this problem. It is written in a fairly straightforward style, and I tried to add plenty of comments to explain things thoroughly.