Differences between version 15 and previous revision of BASIC.
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| Newer page: | version 15 | Last edited on Tuesday, November 11, 2003 4:26:11 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 14 | Last edited on Sunday, October 26, 2003 7:32:11 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -1,7 +1,9 @@
-[Acronym] for __B__eginners __A__ll-Purpose __S__ymbolic __I__nstruction __C__ode (supposedly a backronym, made up after the name BASIC was already in use).
+[Acronym] for __B__eginners __A__ll-Purpose __S__ymbolic __I__nstruction __C__ode (supposedly a backronym, made up after the name [
BASIC]
was already in use).
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.
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__ 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 "appaling", with occasional side trips to "hair raising" and "seizure inducing".
