BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College by Kemeny and Kurtz in the mid 1960s. The intention was to produce a language that was very simple for students to learn and that supported easy translation. The principal advantage of BASIC is thus that it can be learnt very quickly and programs written within one or two days of practice (compare this with C or C++!). However, as a consequence of its simplicity, it is no suited to sophisticated or comprehensive programming applications. BASIC became very popular following the introduction of the microcomputer in the mid 70s and is still considered by many to be the home computing language of choice.
One of the most notable features of BASIC (together with languages such as APL developed at roughly the same time) is that it is interactive, i.e. it provided the programmer with facilities for on line programming. Earlier comparable languages, such as FORTRAN or ALGOL were compiled. A disadvantage associated with interactive languages is that they must be interpreted, consequently programs are much slower to run than the equivalent machine code produced by a compiler. This is the principal reason why programming languages supported by compilers are still popular today.
Created and maintained by Frans Coenen. Last updated 12 July 2000