BASIC
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BASIC
Screenshot of Atari BASIC, an early BASIC language for small computers
Paradigm
unstructured, later procedural, later object-oriented
Appeared in Designed by
John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz
Typing discipline
strong
Major implementations Apple BASIC, Commodore BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, BBC BASIC, TI-BASIC Influenced by
ALGOL 60, FORTRAN II, JOSS
Influenced
COMAL, Visual BASIC, Visual Basic .NET, Realbasic, REXX, Perl, GRASS
In computer programming, BASIC (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code[1] ) is a family of high-level programming languages. The original BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to be able to do. The language and its variants became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and 1980s. BASIC remains popular to this day in a handful of highly modified dialects and new languages influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. As of 2006, 59% of developers for the .NET platform used Visual Basic .NET as their only language.[2]
History Before the mid-1960s, computers were extremely expensive and used only for special-purpose tasks. A simple batch processing arrangement ran only a single "job" at a time, one after another. But during the 1960s faster and more affordable computers became available. With this extra processing power, computers would sometimes sit idle, without jobs to run. Programming languages in the batch programming era tended to be designed, like the machines on which they ran, for specific purposes (such as scientific formula calculations or business data processing or eventually for text editing). Since even the newer, less expensive machines were still major investments, there was a strong tendency to consider efficiency to be the most important feature of a language. In general, these specialized languages were difficult to use and had widely disparate syntax. As prices decreased, the possibility of sharing computer access began to move from research labs to commercial use. Newer computer systems supported time-sharing, a system which allows multiple users or processes to use the RAM and memory. In such a system the operating system alternates between running processes, giving each one running time on the RAM before switching to another. The machines had become fast enough that most users could feel they had the machine all to themselves. In theory, timesharing reduced the cost of computing tremendously, as a single