BASIC Computer Language Turns 40

5 REM nam37 codes
10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END

Comments

Re:ahem

[bee-yotch]

they started it in '63, they didn't finish it till '64. rtfa

Re:WHY! WON'T! IT! DIE!

[Theatetus]

I've heard it claimed that BASIC was "invented" by Microsoft

Microsoft certainly doesn't claim that.

or that they own it

Nor do they claim that

or that their first product was a BASIC interpreter

They do claim that, because it's true.

What's the connection between MS and BASIC?

BASIC was always the applications and scripting language at Microsoft. For a long time, DOS and the early Windows shipped with a free basic interpreter (sadly, those days are over).

Visual Basic remains one of Microsoft's flagship products. It's philosophy is similar to the original BASIC philosophy: you shouldn't have to be a comp sci graduate to write computer programs. Whether VB succeeds in that regard is another question, but it's what they intended.

BASIC is still Microsoft's language for application automation (think Visual Basic for Applications), Web development (ASP with VBScript), and as a tool control language for gluing together objects written in lower level languages. In a sense, some form of BASIC fills the roles in Windows that Scheme, Perl, and TCL occupy in UNIX.

Re:Nostolgia

[AKAImBatman]

You wish is my command. Here's the source code plus there's a PALM version at the bottom of the list. In case you want to type it in yourself, SmallBASIC accepts traditional BASIC syntax. Someone event did a SmallBASIC port of Super Star Trek for you!

Re:Today we use Bash

[ajs318]

Better to use something like

int main() { /* i wish this thing would indent properly */
for (1;1;1) { /* will loop forever */
printf("ajs318 is a better programmer than Jorkapp\n");
};
};

Repeatedly calling main() from within main() probably would overflow the stack. It's the equivalent of using GOSUB in BASIC when you meant GOTO -- GOSUBs and function calls have to remember where they were called from, which is what a stack is used for. If the compiler you were using was tolerant enough that you could declare void main(), then it would last about twice as long before crashing and burning, due to not having to temporarily remember an integer it's later going to have to throw away.