Acronym for Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Code.
(This is 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.
BASIC's 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. GOSUB and RETURN call subroutines.
Basic became very popular in the era of HomeComputers? because a Basic interpreter was small and simple and would fit in ROM. (Some PCs even had it in ROM - INT 18. I remember trying it in DOS's debug program and the machine would lock up saying "no basic rom installed" or something. Sad.)
Lots of little kids leaned to program in BASIC. Some never recovered2?. Every home computer had a different dialect of BASIC, so there are thousands of dialect of BASIC. One reason for this is that BASIC is so pathetically limited it needs to be heavily extended to make it useful. Most BASIC dialects still in use have been extended to strongly resemble Pascal.
There is no real use for BASIC on Linux. If you you think you want BASIC, then you'd probably be happier with Python and a good learn-Python textbook.
Basic is favoured by Microsoft for some reason. Don't ask me why. They even made a "Visual" version. Maybe they were on drugs.1?
1? Back when Bill Gates was real programmer he wrote Basic interpreters for the first microcomputers (maybe he was on drugs), so he's had a soft spot for Basic ever since.
2? "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." -- Dijkstra
