BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use; the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
The original Dartmouth 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 do. The language and its variants became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and 1980s, when it was typically a standard feature, and often part of the firmware of the machine. The presence of an easy-to-learn language such as BASIC on these early personal computers allowed small business owners to develop their own custom application software, leading to widespread use of these computers in businesses that previously did not have access to computing technology.
BASIC remains popular in numerous dialects and new languages influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. In 2006, 59% of developers for the .NET Framework used Visual Basic .NET as their only programming language.
Other articles related to "basic":
... In computer science, primitive data type is either of the following a basic type is a data type provided by a programming language as a basic building block ... be recursively constructed starting from basic types ... In most programming languages, all basic data types are built-in ...
... GFA Basic was widely used to quickly create editors by game developers ... For example, Éric Chahi wrote a game editor in GFA basic to create his game Another World, including scene design and game scripting only the game engine (polygon rendering and music) was done in assembler ... Köper of Thalion software wrote all the basic game editing software for the "Amberstar" series using GFA Basic ...
... ANSI/ISO/IEC Standard for Minimal BASIC ANSI X3.60-1978 "For minimal BASIC" ISO/IEC 63731984 "Data Processing — Programming Languages — Minimal BASIC" ANSI/ISO/IEC Standard ...
... Data General Business Basic was a BASIC interpreter (based on MAI Basic Four's version) developed by Data General for their Nova minicomputer in the 1970s, and later ... A majority of applications for the Nova were developed in Business Basic ... Business Basic was an integer-only language inspired by COBOL, and contained powerful string-handling functions as well as the ability to manipulate indexed files very quickly ...
... GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language, by Frank Ostrowski ... for the Atari ST homecomputer range (since the ST BASIC shipped with them was more primitive) ... GFA BASIC (as of version 2.0, the most popular one) was, by the standards of its time, a very modern programming language ...
Famous quotes containing the word basic:
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”
—Philip K. Dick (1928–1982)
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“It is not an exaggeration to say that play is as basic to your child’s total development as good food, cleanliness, and rest.”
—Joanne E. Oppenheim (20th century)