see also: Programming Languages
A brief history
BASIC was invented in 1964 by John Kemeny and T. Kurtz, at [http://www.dartmouth.edu
Dartmouth college], where Kemeny later became President. It stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Bill Gates made his first Micro$oft dollars by porting BASIC to different platforms.
BASIC was originally intended to be used as a teaching tool, much as Pascal, to prepare students for Fortran.
Coding
A typical BASIC program would look like:
10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
20 PRINT “WELCOME TO BASIC”
30 END
As as I remember, BASIC needs the line numbers. This made it easy to POKE lines into code, especially useful with tapes at run-time. For example, you could add the line ’15 PRINT “HELLO MUM”‘. You could also very easily overwrite a line without realising. Entering ’15 PRINT “STOP BEING SILLY”‘ would overwrite the previous ‘hello mum’ without a care or a prompt…
Like many words, BASIC also looks really odd if you read it over and over. You can achieve this in BASIC with the simple program:
10 PRINT “BASIC”
20 GOTO 10
BASIC was great fun in school when it came to pranking your schoolfriends…;)
Links
- http://www.phys.uu.nl/~bergmann/history.html History of BASIC
- http://www.cix.co.uk/~rrussell/products/bbcwin/download.html Free Evaluation BASIC for windows
- http://www.bbcbasic.org/ Tutorials, sample code, interpreter, links re: BBC BASIC
- Emulator – for links to various emulators such as BeebEm
TakeDown.NET -> “BASIC”