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BASIC Last modified: Wednesday, May 23, 2001

Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Developed by John Kemeney and Thomas Kurtz in the mid 1960s at Dartmouth College, BASIC is one of the earliest and simplest high-level programming languages. During the 1970s, it was the principal programming language taught to students, and continues to be a popular choice among educators. Despite its simplicity, BASIC is used for a wide variety of business applications. There is an ANSI standard for the BASIC language, but most versions of BASIC include many proprietary extensions. Microsoft's popular Visual Basic, for example, adds many object-oriented features to the standard BASIC. Recently, many variations of BASIC have appeared as programming, or macro, languages within applications. For example, Microsoft Word and Excel both come with a version of BASIC with which users can write programs to customize and automate these applications.

BASIC archives Provides an FAQ, as well as additional help files. There is also information on BASIC compilers and interpreters. BASIC FTP servers Provides a list of anonymous FTP servers that have a BASIC section. There are three categories which include general, QuickBasic, and PowerBasic. Liberty BASIC Describes Liberty BASIC, a shareware programming language for Windows and OS/2. The site contains links to download software, screenshots, related files, tutorials, links to other BASIC programming sites. The PowerBasic Archives Resources for BASIC and PowerBasic programmers. Includes a very good collection of BASIC related links. The Programmer's Page Contains a collection of BASIC source code files, libraries, compilers, help files and games. Yahoo!'s BASIC page Yahoo!'s directory of the BASIC programming language. Yahoo!'s BASIC page Yahoo!'s directory of links for the BASIC programming language.