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BASIC: Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

The full form of BASIC is Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is a family of high-level programming languages designed to be easy to use. The original version of the Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) was designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz and launched at Dartmouth College in 1964. They wanted to allow students from fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, almost all use of computers required the creation of custom software, something that only scientists and mathematicians used to learn. On the first IBM “family” computer, the PCJr, a BASIC cartridge was a popular add-on.

With the introduction of BASIC, people began to develop custom software on their personal computers for business, professions, etc. BASIC is still used because it can be learned quickly, its statements are easy to read by other programmers, and support is available on most operating systems (OS). It uses numbers like 10, 20, 30 at the beginning of each line to process the instructions. Most modern BASIC implementations use “while loops”, which execute a series of instructions as long as a given case is true. The latest BASIC development software also supports more data types, such as integers, strings, and arrays, to store variables and other data. While early BASIC development environments were strictly text-based, today’s BASIC programming software allows developers to design much of their programs visually, using a graphical user interface (GUI). BASIC is currently used only to teach the basics of programming.

Other full forms of BASIC