BASIC : Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

BASIC is one of the high-level programming language, that is suitable for general purpose, easy to write and can be converted to low-level programming language like C. BASIC was developed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz.

There is nothing to get astonished with the difference of 1964 and 2013 – UNIX is still the most versatile, robust operating system that is leading for the past 40 years, now on your Mac as OS X. Except Linux, after UNIX, there are only few stable operating systems which has been developed. It is nothing abnormal to find the fact, still a BASIC compiler for OS X can cost $100 or more. This is a must to read article for Microsoft Most Vulnerable Valuable Professionals after reading the article on OpenVMS or Open Virtual Memory System.

The nomenclature clearly shows the design goal: to create a simple, programming language suitable for beginners. Except in some product names, the word “BASIC” is always written in capital letters.

Purpose, Goal and History of BASIC

The BASIC language was designed based on eight principles:

• Easy to learn for beginners
• Universally accepted.
• Extensibility of the language.
• Interactivity.
• Short response times.
• Hardware independence.
• Operating system independence.
• Clear error messages.

BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College to start programming against Algol and Fortran to facilitate learning computing. Fortran (previously written as FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language developed by IBM that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Sarcastically, IBM later adopted BASIC and practically promoted BASIC. With the introduction of Visual Basic version 5 Microsoft achieved significant success in terms of processing speed, but could recover the lost ground before it again. Microsoft changed their mind, however, folowing their own tradition led the commercial Visual Basic supporting the rapid development of Windows-based applications. The code no longer needed to be runtime interpreted, but it was done by a compiler during program development in low-level bytecode or in later versions in native machine code it was translated.

With the introduction of object-oriented language elements, a further attempt was made ??to Visual Basic with other object-oriented languages ??such as C ++ to catch up. Basic is still present in the Office products from Microsoft and also in some other applications as VBA, which were successfully used for macro programming.

Atari BASIC is a BASIC interpreter for the Atari 8-bit family of 6502-based home computers where as Integer BASIC was written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter for Apple I and Apple II computers. In Atari BASIC that $ sign was introduced. You have heard of Microsoft’s Disk operating system or MS DOS (DOS were for various micro and mini-computers). MS DOS and the extended BASIC with 3½-inch floppy disk support were simultaneously developed by Microsoft. Without MS DOS, that OpenVMS kernel will not load. Here is a gap where the common exploits for Microsoft Windows NT are targeted. This is the basic reason why, despite Windows 95 was bad; it had less vulnerability to malwares than Windows XP (NT based).

BASIC is now considered one of the most easy to learn and to C and C + + being the most widely used programming languages.

Programming in BASIC

If you search in Google web search with “BASIC for Windows”, “BASIC for OS X”, you will understand that – BASIC is a language that still has a demand market. You can play with BASIC in real time as an online software :

The following example shows a typical BASIC code. Many commands that have been established in modern languages ??and modern BASIC dialects. One advantage of the BASIC is the fact that 70 to 90 can easily do the very simple work :