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Newer page: version 29 Last edited on Friday, March 17, 2006 2:53:16 pm by IanMcDonald
Older page: version 28 Last edited on Friday, March 17, 2006 2:31:40 pm by SteveTompkins Revert
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 A simplistic interactive ProgrammingLanguage designed at Dartmouth University in the 1960's to teach mathematics students how to program. They would go on to programming in [Fortran] IV, so this is the language that [BASIC] most closely resembles. 
  
-Not to be confused with VisualBasic, a wildly extended dialect of [BASIC] that only resembles its ancestor remotely and is still part of MicrosoftCorporation's portfolio and strategy. Also QuickBASIC from MS (Not to be confused with QBASIC witch was a very cutdown version included with DOS 5 mainley used as the line editor for DOS. QuickBASIC for DOS was a compiler with a powerfull IDE and lots of biltin commands and fuctions . Both QuickBASIC and VisualBASIC are more stucherd(opps I am dislex... perhaps some one will creact my spelling) languge that the orignal BASIC. I would love to see a port of QuickBASIC for linux. 
+Not to be confused with VisualBasic, a wildly extended dialect of [BASIC] that only resembles its ancestor remotely and is still part of MicrosoftCorporation's portfolio and strategy. Also QuickBASIC from Microsoft (Not to be confused with QBASIC which was a very cutdown version included with [ DOS] 5 mainly used as the line editor for DOS. QuickBASIC for DOS was a compiler with a powerful IDE and lots of built in commands and functions . Both QuickBASIC and VisualBASIC are more stuctured langauge than the original BASIC. I would love to see a port of QuickBASIC for linux. 
  
 In the original [BASIC] language, the available control structures are as primitive as those in AssemblyLanguage. A [BASIC] program is series of numbered statements that are usually executed in sequence. A __[GOTO| GoTo]__ statement sends execution to another statement. An __IF__ statement does that conditionally. Using __GOSUB__ and __RETURN__ you can implement subroutines, but there's no stack to pass parameters with. 
  
 As there are no structuring constructs, there is no concept of scope, and every single variable is global. In the absence of user defined functions, expressiveness is extremely limited, so you need a ''lot'' of temporary variables. Combine these limitations, and the result is that most [BASIC] code is a mess that ranges somewhere between “hideous” and “appalling,” with occasional side trips to “hair raising” and “seizure inducing.”