| BASIC Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. A simple language designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. It first ran on an on 1964-05-01. It was designed for quick and easy programming by students and beginners. BASIC exists in many dialects, and is popular on s with sound and graphics support. Most micro versions are interactive and interpreted, but the original Dartmouth BASIC was compiled. BASIC was originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental system and has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like ) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year. Originally, all references to code, both and GOSUB (subroutine call) referred to the destination by its line number. This allowed for very simple editing in the days before s were considered an essential tool on every computer. Just typing the line number deleted the line and to edit a line you just typed the new line with the same number. Programs were typically numbered in steps of ten to allow for insertions. Later versions, such as , allow -less with named procedures and functions, IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF constructs and loops etc. Early BASICs had no graphic operations except with graphic characters. In the 1970s BASIC s became standard features in s and s. Some versions included matrix operations as language primitives. A for a mixture of 's and is {here (ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/Unix-c/languages/basic/basic.tar-z)}. A and were in the comp.sources.unix archives volume 2. See also , , , . [] (1995-03-15) |
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