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":
... GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language, by Frank Ostrowski. 80s, it became very popular 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 ...
... 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 for Full ...
... 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 (polygo ... Similarly, Karsten Köper of Thalion software wrote all the basic game editing software for the "Amberstar" series using GFA Basic ...
... 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 ported to the Data General ... 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 ...
... 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 ... more complicated composite types to be recursively constructed starting from basic types ... In most programming languages, all basic data types are built-in ...
Famous quotes containing the word basic:
“Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. It is the freedom to refrain, withdraw and abstain which makes a totalitarian regime impossible.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)