Difference between revisions of "User:51mplex/drydock"

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==Origins and historical use==
==Origins and historical use==
Relatively few high-level languages existed in the 1960s, and all major ones (COBOL, FORTRAN, Lisp, ALGOL) were intended for business or scientific use. Their requirements were large, and they were too difficult to learn for a typical computer user. The original BASIC was created at Dartmouth College, by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz, for use by non-science students. They released the original  compiler free of charge.
BASIC was created with simplicity of use in mind, for people who weren't and did not want to be interested in computer science. Its low complexity and great popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s made most microcomputer companies include firmware implementations in their products, including Apple, Atari, Commodore and IBM, effectively making it a standard for home computing.


In the early microcomputer era (late 1970s and 1980s), BASIC rapidly spread to many microcomputing platforms, including Apple, Atari and the IBM PC. They often contained a firmware implementation, which lead to multiple forks and dialects.
Its legacy survives in the form of [[Visual Basic]] and Visual Basic .NET. Some advanced calculators, most famously the Texas Instruments series, can be programmed using a dialect of BASIC.


BASIC was important to Microsoft in its early days, and its influence survives in the form of [[Visual Basic]] and Visual Basic .NET.
==Characteristics==
Traditional BASIC is a procedural, imperative, unstructured language, with few types and no objects. This makes BASIC impractical for large projects. Another problem is portability, as BASIC probably has more dialects than any other programming language, owing to no formal standards.


==Characteristics==
==Roguelikes written in BASIC==
BASIC is an imperative, traditionally unstructured language, which has the unfortunate consequence of [[spaghetti code]]. Traditional BASIC dialects don't have

Revision as of 12:38, 9 May 2013

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose high-level programming languages, first introduced in 1964. As the name suggests, it was created with ease of use in mind.

Origins and historical use

BASIC was created with simplicity of use in mind, for people who weren't and did not want to be interested in computer science. Its low complexity and great popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s made most microcomputer companies include firmware implementations in their products, including Apple, Atari, Commodore and IBM, effectively making it a standard for home computing.

Its legacy survives in the form of Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET. Some advanced calculators, most famously the Texas Instruments series, can be programmed using a dialect of BASIC.

Characteristics

Traditional BASIC is a procedural, imperative, unstructured language, with few types and no objects. This makes BASIC impractical for large projects. Another problem is portability, as BASIC probably has more dialects than any other programming language, owing to no formal standards.

Roguelikes written in BASIC