GW-Basic Binary Program Decoder

GW-BASIC (aka GWBASIC or Gee-Whiz Basic) was a BASIC interpreter developed by Microsoft and bundled with MS-DOS until the advent of QBASIC with MS-DOS 5.0. GW-BASIC stored programs in memory at a time when memory was very scarce. Hence it used a compact, binary representation of code. It used this same binary format for code saved on disk, which makes it hard to read GW-BASIC programs nowadays.

Or at least it used to. Thanks to this site, I was able to write a decoder in Python. You can find it on GitHub: danvk/gwbasic-decoder.

Please leave comments! It's what makes writing worthwhile.