BASIC

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose high-level programming languages, first introduced in 1964. As the name suggests, it was created with ease of use in mind.

Origins and historical use

BASIC was originally created for people who weren't and did not want to be interested in computer science. Its low complexity and great popularity in the late 1970s and 1980s made most microcomputer companies include firmware implementations in their products, including Apple, Atari, Commodore and IBM, effectively making it a standard for home computing.

Its legacy survives in the form of Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET. Some advanced calculators, most famously the Texas Instruments series, can be programmed using a dialect of BASIC.

Characteristics

Traditional BASIC is a procedural, imperative, unstructured language, with few types and no objects. This makes BASIC impractical for large projects. Another problem is portability, as BASIC probably has more dialects than any other programming language, owing to no formal standards.