I (vaguely) remember writing a QBASIC subroutine that would take a string and a substring, and search that string for an instance of a substring, so the program would continue depending on the user input. I was greatly obsessed with Zork at the time, particularly Return to Zork, and after buying the original Zork games at a pawnshop set about trying to write my own. There were many CASE-statements, let me tell you!

I forget why I stopped... after having my "batch file commander" stage and my "write a QBASIC program for everything I can think of" stage I got fed up the languages I had to work with. Mom and Dad got me a Borland Turbo C++ compiler for my birthday one year and I just got frustrated with that too... didn't make it very far with the infinitely more complex language (at least it seemed so at the time). I believe I dropped programming altogether and started hitting the BBS scene and focusing on hardware. Beautiful, sweet, simple hardware. =) That was the end of that.

A few years later I discovered mIRC-script. A year or two later, Linux, databases and Perl. It was downhill from there!

Ah, memories...

Alakaboo

...a short time later...

Great scott, I found it! LOL... You aren't going to believe this:

DEF fnCheck (Dir$, Targ$, Length)
fnCheck = 0
FOR X = 1 TO 50
IF MID$(Dir$, X, Length) = Targ$ THEN fnCheck = 1
NEXT X
END DEF

INPUT "String to search: ", Dir$
INPUT "String to find: ", Targ$
Targ$ = UCASE$(Targ$)
Dir$ = UCASE$(Dir$)
IF fnCheck(Dir$, Targ$, LEN(Targ$)) = 1 THEN
PRINT "Is in string."
ELSE
PRINT "Not in string."
END IF
[download]

{dies of laughter} I also found a H2O trivia program for 6th grade science class, a modem chat program for two people to connect via analog modem and type with each other, an ASCII flat file parser that would build a webpage out of a small database, and a program I wrote that would search a database of the Windows 95 CAB files and tell you which CAB the file you need is in. Oh, brother!