CSC 272 - Software II: Principles of Programming Languages

DR. R. M. Siegfried

The BASIC Programming Language

BASIC was developed by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth where it was used to teach programming as part of Dartmouth's general degree requirements, making it the first college to require a computer literacy course. The language was based heavily on FORTRAN but was designed to run in an interactive environment.

BASIC's biggest boost came when Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a version of it for the MITS Altair, the first microcomputer. Every microcomputer (or personal computer) since then has had a version of BASIC designed for it.

BASIC originallay was line-oriented, with each line numbered. All variables are real by default with integer variables ending with a % and strings ending with a $.

BASIC has evolved over the years into a structured language and into an object-oriented language that can be used for the event-driven programming in a Windows environment. We know this as Visual BASIC. You will find below links to three examples which show you how to code basic constructs in BASIC:

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