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Computing (FOLDOC) dictionary (also found in English - Vietnamese, English - English (Wordnet), Vietnamese - Vietnamese)
BASIC
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language Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
A simple language oroginally designed for ease of programming
by students and beginners.
BASIC exists in many dialects, and is popular on
microcomputers with sound and graphics support. Most micro
versions are interactive and interpreted.
BASIC has become the leading cause of brain-damage in
proto-hackers. This is another case (like Pascal) of the
cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately
designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A
novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20
lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very
painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it
harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be
so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential
wizards a year.
Originally, all references to code, both GOTO and GOSUB
(subroutine call) referred to the destination by its line
number. This allowed for very simple editing in the days
before text editors were considered essential. Just typing
the line number deleted the line and to edit a line you just
typed the new line with the same number. Programs were
typically numbered in steps of ten to allow for insertions.
Later versions, such as BASIC V, allow GOTO-less
functions, IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF constructs and WHILE loops
etc.
Early BASICs had no graphic operations except with graphic
characters. In the 1970s BASIC interpreters became standard
features in mainframes and minicomputers. Some versions
included matrix operations as language primitives.