Microsoft BASIC, GW-BASIC and BASICA all use a prompt that looks like this:
I can't figure out how to exit any of these. Typing END does not exit them. EXIT, QUIT, Q, Ctrl+C, and everything else that I can think of also does not work.
I'm sure there's a way to do this. I can't imagine everyone who used BASICA on DOS had to restart their machine every single time they wanted to exit the development environment.
So, how do I exit from the old BASIC editor prompt?
GWBASIC and its clones (e.g., IBM's BASIC and BASICA) exited to the DOS prompt with the command system.
Although redirection was possible even in early versions of MS-DOS/PC-DOS, the BASIC interpreter bypassed using the standard input and output streams, and had its own Ctrl-Break/Ctrl-C handler, so neither of those keystrokes would terminate the interpreter.
The shell command started a fresh copy of the system command interpreter (usually COMMAND.COM), or executed a system command and then returned to BASIC, but did not remove the interpreter from memory.
Type "system" and hit enter to exit GW-BASIC in DOS.
Type "shell" and hit enter to go to DOS but still have GW-BASIC in memory. Type "exit" while in DOS to return to GW-BASIC.
Usually for those command line editors Ctl-Z would do the trick since it sends the EOF character and thus signal terminating input.
If that doesn't do it, try typing system
According to the manual linked by paulsm4, CTRL-BREAK while output is being redirected will exit BASIC. It also says the SHELL command returns to the MS-DOS command shell. (On the original IBM PC, the BASIC was in ROM, and therefore always resident in memory.)
