BASIC - LQWiki

From LQWiki

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s. When microcomputers first came out, BASIC was one of the few languages small enough to run on them. On many microcomputers, a BASIC interpreter was installed on ROM, and served as a default operating system. Many of the programs for the early microcomputers took the form of printed BASIC programs in the back of computing magazines like BYTE. These programs were typed in manually by the users. In some cases, the owners couldn't afford storage devices like tape or floppy disk drives. This meant that the user had to type in the program every time the computer was booted!

BASIC was a simple language that was easy for novice programmers to learn, but beyond about 100 lines of code, coding becomes very painful. This was because of the use of gotos.

In recent times, BASIC has matured, becoming more like full fledged programming languages like Pascal and C. An example of these present day BASICs is Microsoft's Visual Basic.

Enough time has passed since the 80's that old-school BASIC has gained some nostalgic value (see retrocomputing). The access to a programming language, even one as braindead as BASIC, immediately upon boot up, inspired many teenagers to become programmers.

One side effect of BASICs long run is that, over the years, many different dialects of BASIC have developed, with varying degrees of cross-compatibility.

External links

Implementations of Eliza in Basic
Wikipedia article on BASIC
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~richardweston/ A site with some sample BASIC programs
{http://wxbasic.sourceforge.net/}

Attributions

Earlier versions of this article were based on an entry from the Jargon File. The present version no longer contains Jargon File material, but remains inspired by it.