Screenshot of Atari BASIC, an early BASIC language for small computers

In computer programming, BASIC (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code^[1]) is a family of high-level programming languages. A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of Computer programming. Structured programming can be seen as a subset or subdiscipline of Procedural programming, one of the major Programming paradigms It is most famous for removing or Procedural programming can sometimes be used as a synonym for Imperative programming (specifying the steps the program must take to reach the desired state but can also John George Kemeny (Kemény János György ( May 31, 1926, Budapest – December 26, 1992, New Hampshire) was a Hungarian Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born February 22, 1928) is an American Computer scientist who co-developed the BASIC programming language in 1963/64 together In Computer science, a type system defines how a Programming language classifies values and expressions into '''types''', how it can In Computer science and Computer programming, the term strong typing is used to describe those situations where Programming languages specify one or more Implementation is the realization of an application or execution of a Plan, idea Model, Design, Specification, standard, Algorithm Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter of the Apple I and original Apple II computers Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company Algol (β Per / Beta Persei known colloquially as the Demon Star, is a bright Star in the Constellation Perseus. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative Programming language that is especially suited to This article is on the programming language See also Religion in China and Incense, Joss Stone for the British female soul singer or Joss Whedon COMAL ( Common Algorithmic Language) is a computer Programming language developed in Denmark by Benedict Løfstedt and Børge Christensen Visual Basic ( VB) is the third-generation event-driven programming language and associated development environment (IDE from Visual Basic.NET ( VBNET) is an object-oriented Computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic REALbasic ( RB) is an Object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language developed and commercially marketed by REAL Software Inc in Austin REXX (REstructured eXtended eXecutor is an interpreted Programming language which was developed at IBM. NOTES FOR EDITORS "Perl" is not an acronym (read the "Name" section below GRASS ( GRAphics Symbiosis System) was a Programming language created to script 2D Vector graphics animations For the version of BASIC bundled with the Atari ST computer series see Atari ST BASIC. Acronyms, initialisms, and alphabetisms are Abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name In computing a high-level programming language is a Programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer The original BASIC was designed in 1964, by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S., to provide access for non-science students to computers. Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. John George Kemeny (Kemény János György ( May 31, 1926, Budapest – December 26, 1992, New Hampshire) was a Hungarian Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born February 22, 1928) is an American Computer scientist who co-developed the BASIC programming language in 1963/64 together Dartmouth College ( is a private, Coeducational University located in Hanover, New Hampshire, U Hanover is a town along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. A scientist, in the broadest sense refers to any person that engages in a systematic activity to acquire Knowledge or an individual that engages in such practices A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and research is the field of Mathematics. The language (in one variant or another) became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and home computers in the 1980s. microcomputer is a Computer with a Microprocessor as its Central processing unit. A home computer was a class of Personal computer entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s BASIC remains popular to this day in a handful of highly modified dialects and new languages based on BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer Visual Basic ( VB) is the third-generation event-driven programming language and associated development environment (IDE from

History

Background

Before the mid-1960s, computers were extremely expensive and used only for special-purpose tasks. A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. A simple batch processing arrangement ran only a single "job" at a time, one after another. Batch processing is execution of a series of programs (" jobs quot on a Computer without human interaction 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). In Mathematics and in the Sciences a formula (plural formulae, formulæ or formulas) is a concise way of expressing information A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development Since even the newer, less expensive machines were still major investments, there was 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. In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the

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 CPU and memory. Time-sharing refers to sharing a computing resource among many users by multitasking. In such a system the operating system alternates between running processes, giving each one running time on the CPU before switching to another. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination 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 machine could be shared among (up to) hundreds of users.

Early years: the mini-computer era

The original BASIC language was designed in 1963 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction. John George Kemeny (Kemény János György ( May 31, 1926, Budapest – December 26, 1992, New Hampshire) was a Hungarian Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born February 22, 1928) is an American Computer scientist who co-developed the BASIC programming language in 1963/64 together BASIC was designed to allow students to write programs for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, or DTSS for short was the first large-scale Time-sharing system to be implemented successfully It was intended to address the complexity issues of older languages with a new language design specifically for the new class of users that time-sharing systems allowed—that is, a less technical user who did not have the mathematical background of the more traditional users and was not interested in acquiring it. Being able to use a computer to support teaching and research was quite novel at the time. In the following years, as other dialects of BASIC appeared, Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC dialect became known as Dartmouth BASIC. Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language.

The eight design principles of BASIC were:

1. Be easy for beginners to use.
2. Be a general-purpose programming language. The term domain-specific language ( DSL) has become popular in recent years in Software development to indicate a Programming language or Specification
3. Allow advanced features to be added for experts (while keeping the language simple for beginners).
4. Be interactive.
5. Provide clear and friendly error messages. An error message is a message displayed when an unexpected condition occurs usually on a Computer or other device
6. Respond quickly for small programs.
7. Not to require an understanding of computer hardware.
8. Shield the user from the operating system.

The language was based partly on the FORTRAN II and partly on the ALGOL 60, with additions to make it suitable for timesharing. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative Programming language that is especially suited to Algol (β Per / Beta Persei known colloquially as the Demon Star, is a bright Star in the Constellation Perseus. (The features of other time-sharing systems such as JOSS and CORC, and to a lesser extent LISP, were also considered. This article is on the programming language See also Religion in China and Incense, Joss Stone for the British female soul singer or Joss Whedon ) It had been preceded by other teaching-language experiments at Dartmouth such as the DARSIMCO (1956) and DOPE (1962 implementations of SAP and DART (1963) which was a simplified FORTRAN II). Initially, BASIC concentrated on supporting straightforward mathematical work, with matrix arithmetic support from its initial implementation as a batch language and full string functionality being added by 1965. In Mathematics, a matrix (plural matrices) is a rectangular table of elements (or entries) which may be Numbers or more generally BASIC was first implemented on the GE-265 mainframe which supported multiple terminals. The GE-200 series was a family of small mainframe Computers of the 1960s built by General Electric. Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as Big Iron) are Computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications typically bulk data A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into and displaying data from a Computer or a Computing Contrary to popular belief, it was a compiled language at the time of its introduction. A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another It was also quite efficient, beating FORTRAN II and ALGOL 60 implementations on the 265 at several fairly computationally intensive (at the time) programming problems such as numerical integration by Simpson's Rule. In Numerical analysis, Simpson's rule is a method for Numerical integration, the numerical approximation of Definite integrals Specifically it is the following

The designers of the language decided to make the compiler available free of charge so that the language would become widespread. They also made it available to high schools in the Dartmouth area and put a considerable amount of effort into promoting the language. As a result, knowledge of BASIC became relatively widespread (for a computer language) and BASIC was implemented by a number of manufacturers, becoming fairly popular on newer minicomputers like the DEC PDP series and the Data General Nova. A minicomputer (colloquially mini) is a class of multi-user Computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum in between the largest Multi-user Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the Computer industry Programmed Data Processor (abbreviated PDP) was the name of a series of Minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation. Data General was one of the first Minicomputer firms from the late 1960s The Data General Nova was a popular 16-bit Minicomputer built by the United States company Data General starting in 1969 The BASIC language was also central to the HP Time-Shared BASIC system in the late 1960s and early 1970s. HP Time-Shared BASIC ( HP TSB) was a Computer system sold by the Hewlett-Packard Corporation in the late 1960s and 1970s based on their HP 2100 In these instances the language tended to be implemented as an interpreter, instead of (or in addition to) a compiler. In Computer science, an interpreter normally means a Computer program that executes, i A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another

Several years after its release, highly-respected computer professionals, notably Edsger W. Dijkstra, expressed their opinions that the use of GOTO statements, which existed in many languages including BASIC, promoted poor programming practices. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ( May 11, 1930 &ndash August 6, 2002; ˈɛtsxər ˈwibə ˈdɛɪkstra was a Dutch computer scientist GOTO is a statement found in many computer Programming languages It is a combination of the English words go and to ^[2] Some have also derided BASIC as too slow (most interpreted versions are slower than equivalent compiled versions) or too simple (many versions, especially for small computers left out important features and capabilities).

Explosive growth: the home computer era

MSX BASIC version 3. MSX BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language. It is an extended version of Microsoft Standard BASIC Version 4 0

Notwithstanding the language's use on several minicomputers, it was the introduction of the MITS Altair 8800 "kit" microcomputer in 1975 that provided BASIC a path to universality. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems ( MITS) was an Albuquerque, New Mexico company founded in 1969 by Forrest Mims and Ed Roberts The MITS Altair 8800 was a Microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold as a mail-order kit through advertisements in microcomputer is a Computer with a Microprocessor as its Central processing unit. Most programming languages required more memory (and/or disk space) than was available on the small computers most users could afford. With the slow memory access that audio tapes provided and the lack of suitable text editors, a language like BASIC which could satisfy these constraints, as well as being interpreted line by line painfully input from a tape device, was attractive. In Computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of information in a persisting and Machine-readable fashion In Computer programming an interpreted language is a Programming language whose implementation often takes the form of an interpreter.

The Commodore VIC-20 used BASIC as its programming language. The VIC-20 ( Germany: VC-20; Japan: VIC-1001) is an 8-bit Home computer which was sold by Commodore Business Machines Line-by-line instructions in the user manual taught users as young as 5 years old the elements of BASIC programming, allowing them to program their VIC-20 to perform simple tasks.

BASIC also had the advantage that it was fairly well known to the young designers (i. e. enthusiastic hobbyists) who took an interest in microcomputers, and generally worked in the electronics industries of the day. Kemeny and Kurtz's earlier proselytizing paid off in this respect and the few hobbyists journals of the era were filled with columns that made mentions of the language or focused entirely on one version compared to others.

One of the first to appear for the 8080 machines like the Altair was Tiny BASIC, a simple BASIC implementation originally written by Dr. Tiny BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC Programming language that can fit into as little as 2 or 3 KB of memory. Li-Chen Wang, and then ported onto the Altair by Dennis Allison at the request of Bob Albrecht (who later founded Dr. Dobb's Journal). Dr Li-Chen Wang ( 1936 -) wrote Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for Intel 8080 -based Microcomputers This was the fourth version of Tiny BASIC Dr Dobb's Journal ( DDJ) is a monthly Journal published in the United States by CMP Technology. The Tiny BASIC design and the full source code were published in 1976 in DDJ.

In 1975, MITS released Altair BASIC, developed by college drop-outs Bill Gates and Paul Allen as the company Micro-Soft (who started today's corporate giant, Microsoft). Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers If you would like to experiment with Wikipedia please copy Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21 1953 is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer The first Altair version was co-written by Gates, Allen and Monte Davidoff in a burst of enthusiasm and neglect of studies. Monte Davidoff ( born 1956) is an American Computer programmer. Versions of Microsoft BASIC (also known then, and most widely as M BASIC or MBASIC, see sidebar) was soon bundled with the original floppy disk-based IBM-PC computers. Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company MBASIC is the '''M'''icrosoft '''BASIC''' implementation of BASIC for the CP/M operating system A floppy disk is an increasingly Obsolete data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin flexible ("floppy" Magnetic storage medium encased Eventually tens-of-thousands of copies and variants were in use because of the success of the IBM-PC. Because of the portability factor, it also became one of the standard languages on the Apple II, which was based on a different microprocessor, the 6502 MPU. The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit Microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology in 1975 By 1979, Microsoft was talking with several microcomputer vendors, including IBM, about licensing a BASIC interpreter for their computers. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology A version was included in the IBM PC ROM chips and as a result, PCs without floppy disks automatically booted into BASIC just like many other small computers.

Newer companies attempted to follow the successes of MITS, IMSAI, North Star and Apple, thus creating a home computer industry. History In May 1972 William Millard began business individually as IMS Associates (IMS in the area of computer consultancy and engineering using his home The North Star is the prominent Pole star that lies closest in the sky to the north celestial pole and which appears (approximately directly overhead to Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics A home computer was a class of Personal computer entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s Meanwhile, BASIC became a standard feature of all but a very few home computers. Most came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM, thus avoiding the problems with not having (or being able to afford) a disk. Soon there were millions of machines running BASIC variants around the world. This was likely a far greater number than all the users of all other languages put together at that time.

There are more dialects of BASIC than there are of any other programming language. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. Most of the home computers of the 1980s had a ROM-resident BASIC interpreter. A home computer was a class of Personal computer entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s In Computer science, an interpreter normally means a Computer program that executes, i

The BBC published BBC BASIC, developed for them by Acorn Computers Ltd, incorporating many extra structuring keywords, as well as comprehensive and versatile direct access to the operating system. Acorn Computers was a British Computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978 It also featured a fully integrated assembler. BBC BASIC was a very well-regarded dialect, and made the transition from the original BBC Micro computer to more than 30 other platforms.

During this growth time for BASIC, many magazines were published such as Creative Computing Magazine that included complete source codes for games, utilities, and other programs. Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution Given BASIC's straightforward nature, it was considered a simple matter to type in the code from the magazine and execute the program. A type-in program, or just type-in, is a Computer program Listing printed in a Computer magazine or book meant to be typed in by the reader Different magazines were published featuring programs for specific computers, though some BASIC programs were universal and could be input into any BASIC-using machine. A logical extension of the magazine idea was the publishing of BASIC source code in full-fledged books: probably the classic example was David Ahl's series of Basic Computer Games. David H Ahl is the founder of Creative Computing magazine He is also the author of many how-to books including Basic Computer Games, the first million-selling [1] [2] [3]

Maturity: the personal computer era

GW-BASIC 3. GW-BASIC was a dialect of BASIC developed by Microsoft from BASICA, originally for Compaq. 22, shown here with the simple Hello world program

Microsoft MS-DOS QBASIC 1. A "Hello World" program is a Computer program that prints out "Hello world!" on a Display device. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational Computer technology Corporation, which rose to dominate the Home computer 1 opening screen

Many newer BASIC versions were created during this period. Microsoft sold several versions of BASIC for MS-DOS/PC-DOS including BASICA, GW-BASIC (a BASICA-compatible version that did not need IBM's ROM) and QuickBASIC. MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. IBM PC-DOS is a DOS operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, sold throughout the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft BASICA (short for "Advanced BASIC" is a simple disk-based BASIC interpreter written by Microsoft for PC-DOS GW-BASIC was a dialect of BASIC developed by Microsoft from BASICA, originally for Compaq. Microsoft QuickBASIC (also QB or incorrectly " QBasic " which is a different system is an Integrated Development Turbo Pascal-publisher Borland published Turbo BASIC 1. Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural Programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in Austin Texas. Turbo Basic is a BASIC Compiler and dialect originally created by Robert 'Bob' Zale and bought from him by Borland. 0 in 1985 (successor versions are still being marketed by the original author under the name PowerBASIC). PowerBASIC is the brand of several commercial Compilers by Venice Florida -based PowerBASIC Inc

These languages introduced many extensions to the original home computer BASIC, such as improved string manipulation and graphics support, access to the file system and additional data types. In Computer programming and some branches of Mathematics, a string is an ordered Sequence of Symbols. In Computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing Computer files and the data they contain to make A data type in Programming languages is an attribute of a datum which tells the computer (and the programmer something about the kind of datum it is More important were the facilities for structured programming, including additional control structures and proper subroutines supporting local variables. Structured programming can be seen as a subset or subdiscipline of Procedural programming, one of the major Programming paradigms It is most famous for removing or In Computer science control flow (or alternatively flow of control refers to the order in which the individual statements, instructions or Function In Computer science, a subroutine ( function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger In Computer science, a local variable is a Variable that is given local scope.

However, by the latter half of the 1980s newer computers were far more capable with more resources. At the same time, computers had progressed from a hobbyist interest to tools used primarily for applications written by others, and programming became less important for most users. BASIC started to recede in importance, though numerous versions remained available. Compiled BASIC or CBASIC is still used in many IBM 4690 OS point of sale systems. CBASIC is a Compiled version of the BASIC Programming language written for the CP/M Operating system by Gordon Eubanks

BASIC's fortunes reversed once again with the introduction of Visual Basic by Microsoft. Visual Basic ( VB) is the third-generation event-driven programming language and associated development environment (IDE from It is somewhat difficult to consider this language to be BASIC, because of the major shift in its orientation towards an object-oriented and event-driven perspective. Object-oriented programming (OOP is a Programming paradigm that uses " objects " and their interactions to design applications and computer programs In Computer programming, event-driven programming or event-based programming is a Programming paradigm in which the flow of the program is determined The only significant similarity to older BASIC dialects was familiar syntax. Syntax itself no longer "fully defined" the language, since much development was done using "drag and drop" methods without exposing all code for commonly-used objects such as buttons and scrollbars to the developer. While this could be considered an evolution of the language, few of the distinctive features of early Dartmouth BASIC, such as line numbers and the INPUT keyword, remain (although Visual Basic still uses INPUT to read data from files, and INPUTBOX is available for direct user input; line numbers can also optionally be used in all VB versions, even VB. Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. In Computing, a line number is a method used to specify a particular sequence of characters in a Text file. NET, albeit they cannot be used in certain places, for instance before SUB).

Ironically given the origin of BASIC as a "beginner's" language, and apparently even to the surprise of many at Microsoft who still initially marketed Visual Basic or "VB" as a language for hobbyists, the language had come into widespread use for small custom business applications shortly after the release of VB version 3. 0, which is widely considered the first relatively stable version. While many advanced programmers still scoffed at its use, VB met the needs of small businesses efficiently wherever processing speed was less of a concern than easy development. (By that time, computers running Windows 3. 1 had become fast enough that many business-related processes could be completed "in the blink of an eye" even using a "slow" language, as long as massive amounts of data were not involved. ) Many small business owners found they could create their own small yet useful applications in a few evenings to meet their own specialized needs. Eventually, during the lengthy lifetime of VB3, knowledge of Visual Basic had become a marketable job skill.

Many BASIC dialects have also sprung up in the last few years, including Bywater BASIC and True BASIC (the direct successor to Dartmouth BASIC from a company controlled by Kurtz). Bywater BASIC is an interpreter for the BASIC programming language. True BASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language descended from Dartmouth BASIC &ndash the original BASIC &ndash invented by college professors John Many other BASIC variants and adaptations have been written by hobbyists, equipment developers, and others, as it is a relatively simple language to develop translators for. An example of an open source interpreter, written in C, is MiniBasic.

The ubiquity of BASIC interpreters on personal computers was such that textbooks once included simple "Try It In BASIC" exercises that encouraged students to experiment with mathematical and computational concepts on classroom or home computers. Futurist and sci-fi writer David Brin mourns the loss of ubiquitous BASIC in a recent Salon article. Glen David Brin, PhD (born October 6, 1950) is an American scientist and award-winning author of Science fiction. ^[3]

Examples

Unstructured BASIC

New BASIC programmers on a home computer might start with a simple program similar to the Hello world program made famous by Kernighan and Ritchie. A "Hello World" program is a Computer program that prints out "Hello world!" on a Display device. The C Programming Language (sometimes referred to as K&R or the white book) is a well-known Computer science Book This generally involves a simple use of the language's PRINT statement to display the message (such as the programmer's name) to the screen. Often an infinite loop was used to fill the display with the message. An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly either due to the loop having no terminating condition or having one that can Most first generation BASIC languages such as MSX BASIC and GW-BASIC supported simple data types, loop cycles and arrays. MSX BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language. It is an extended version of Microsoft Standard BASIC Version 4 GW-BASIC was a dialect of BASIC developed by Microsoft from BASICA, originally for Compaq. The following example is written for GW-BASIC, but will work in most versions of BASIC with minimal changes:

10 INPUT "What is your name: ", U$
20 PRINT "Hello "; U$
30 INPUT "How many stars do you want: ", N
40 S$ = ""
50 FOR I = 1 TO N
60 S$ = S$ + "*"
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S$
90 INPUT "Do you want more stars? ", A$
100 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN 90
110 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)
120 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN 30
130 PRINT "Goodbye ";U$
140 END

Structured BASIC

Second generation BASICs (for example QuickBASIC and PowerBASIC) introduced a number of features into the language, primarily related to structured and procedure-oriented programming. Microsoft QuickBASIC (also QB or incorrectly " QBasic " which is a different system is an Integrated Development PowerBASIC is the brand of several commercial Compilers by Venice Florida -based PowerBASIC Inc Usually, line numbering is omitted from the language and replaced with jump labels (for GOTO) and procedures to facilitate easier and more flexible design.

INPUT "What is your name: ", UserName$
PRINT "Hello "; UserName$
DO
  INPUT "How many stars do you want: ", NumStars
  Stars$ = STRING$(NumStars, "*") 
  PRINT Stars$
  DO
    INPUT "Do you want more stars? ", Answer$
  LOOP UNTIL Answer$ <> ""
  Answer$ = LEFT$(Answer$, 1)
LOOP WHILE UCASE$(Answer$) = "Y"
PRINT "Goodbye "; UserName$

"Modern" BASIC

Third generation BASIC dialects such as Visual Basic and StarOffice Basic introduced features to support object-oriented and event-driven programming paradigm. Visual Basic ( VB) is the third-generation event-driven programming language and associated development environment (IDE from StarOffice Basic (also known as StarBasic and OOoBasic) is a dialect of BASIC that is included with the OpenOffice Most built-in procedures and functions now represented as methods of standard objects rather than operators.

The previous example in Visual Basic .NET:

Public Class stars
    Public Sub Main()
        Dim UserName, Answer, stars As String
        Dim NumStars, I As Integer
        Console. Visual Basic.NET ( VBNET) is an object-oriented Computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic  Write("What is your name: ")
        UserName = Console. ReadLine()
        Console. WriteLine("Hello {0}", UserName)
        Do
            Console. Write("How many stars do you want: ")
            NumStars = CInt(Console. ReadLine())
            stars = New String("*", NumStars)
            Console. WriteLine(stars)
            Do
                Console. Write("Do you want more stars? ")
                Answer = Console. ReadLine()
            Loop Until Answer <> ""
            Answer = Answer. Substring(0, 1)
        Loop While Answer. ToUpper() = "Y"
        Console. Write("Goodbye {0}", UserName)
    End Sub
End Class

See also

• List of BASIC dialects
• List of BASIC dialects by platform

Notes

References

• (1964) A Manual for BASIC, the elementary algebraic language designed for use with the Dartmouth Time Sharing System. Dartmouth College Computation Center.   — The original Dartmouth BASIC manual.
• Lien, David A. (1986). The Basic Handbook: Encyclopedia of the BASIC Computer Language, 3rd ed. , Compusoft Publishing. ISBN 0-932760-33-3.   — Documents dialect variations for over 250 versions of BASIC.
• Kemeny, John G. ; Kurtz, Thomas E. (1985). Back To BASIC: The History, Corruption, and Future of the Language. Addison-Wesley, 141 pp. ISBN 0-201-13433-0.  
• Sammet, Jean E. (1969). Programming languages: History and fundamentals. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. : Prentice-Hall.  
• The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages. BASIC - Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Murdoch University.

Standards

• ANSI/ISO/IEC Standard for Minimal BASIC:
  • ANSI X3. 60-1978 "FOR MINIMAL BASIC"
  • ISO/IEC 6373:1984 "DATA PROCESSING - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES - MINIMAL BASIC"
• ANSI/ISO/IEC Standard for Full BASIC:
  • ANSI X3. 113-1987 "PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES FULL BASIC"
  • ISO/IEC 10279:1991 "INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES - FULL BASIC"
• ANSI/ISO/IEC Addendum Defining Modules:
  • ANSI X3. 113 INTERPRETATIONS-1992 "BASIC TECHNICAL INFORMATION BULLETIN # 1 INTERPRETATIONS OF ANSI 03. 113-1987"
  • ISO/IEC 10279:1991/ Amd 1:1994 "MODULES AND SINGLE CHARACTER INPUT ENHANCEMENT"

External links

• BASIC at the Open Directory Project
• More Basic Computer Games by David Ahl
• Big Computer Games by David Ahl
• ScriptBasic - Open source Basic interpreter (utility, CGI and multi-threaded HTTP application server)
• CellularBASIC On-phone Open Source Mobile BASIC Interpreter for J2ME