Differences between version 20 and previous revision of BASIC.
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| Newer page: | version 20 | Last edited on Thursday, November 25, 2004 2:32:10 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 19 | Last edited on Thursday, June 3, 2004 8:40:49 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -1,9 +1,11 @@
[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).
-
10 PRINT "This is a"
-
20 PRINT "Haiku program"
-
30 GOTO 10
+<verbatim>
+
10 PRINT "This is a"
+20 PRINT "Haiku program"
+30 GOTO 10
+</verbatim>
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.
@@ -11,9 +13,10 @@
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 "appaling", with occasional side trips to "hair raising" and "seizure inducing".
-;:
''It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that [
[sic] have had prior exposure to [BASIC]; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.'' %%%
-- EdsgerWybeDijkstra
+
''It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that ~
[sic] have had prior exposure to [BASIC]; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.''
+ <br>
-- EdsgerWybeDijkstra
The language is so pathetically limited that it needs to be heavily extended to be useful. Of course, every implementor chose their own ways to do so, so there are thousands of dialects of [BASIC]. Some have quite sophisticated extensions, and most of those still in use have been extended to strongly resemble [Pascal].
[BASIC] became very popular in the era of HomeComputers because a [BASIC] interpreter is simple and so could easily be fit on a tiny [ROM]. Lots of little kids learned to program in one of the thousands of flavours of [BASIC] this way, some never to recover.
