QBasic, while also very simple, does not provide many of the features you'll find in modern languages. For that reason, I highly recommend QBasic over GW-BASIC. This page documents the differences between the two languages, clarifying the advantages of using QBasic.

Summary       Features

Unsupported Keywords Behavior

You may also want to read these articles from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on feature and behavior, differences between QBasic and GW-BASIC.

Unsupported Keywords
As programming languages evolve it can be difficult to maintain compatibility for every feature. In the case of GW-BASIC, QuickBasic, and QBasic (which is the sequence in which they were developed), here are the features whose support was lost.

QBasic vs GW-BASIC
Because of the changes in the editor and how external programs are called, QBasic does not support the following GW-BASIC keywords.

• Editor
  AUTO, EDIT, MERGE, RENUM, CONT, LIST, SAVE, DELETE, LLIST, NEW, LOAD

• Calling External Program
  DEF USR, USR

• Device Support
  MOTOR

• Errors
  EXTERR

Note: See KB50947 for a work-around for EXTERR.

QBasic vs QuickBasic
As have been stated, QBasic is a subset of Microsoft's commercial QuickBasic product. Here are the QuickBasic keywords which are not supported in QBasic. As you can see, the differences are rather small.

• System Calls
  COMMAND$, Int86, Int86XC, Interrupt, InterruptX, EVENT, UEVENT, SIGNAL

• Declarations
  CDECL, ALIAS, BYVAL, $INCLUDE, LOCAL, SADD, SETMEM

It also does not have QuickBASIC's Load, Unload, Create File, DOS Shell, Undo, some View, Search, Run, and Debug options, has no Calls function, or right-click options. It does come with mouse support and an extensive help file. This version was released with MS-DOS 6.0 - 6.22. Total installed size: 376K