Talk:BASIC

message: :I removed the following sentence from the article: Based on an article originally written for Nupedia by Peter Fedorow <fedorowpATyahoo.com>, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. As far as I can tell there has never been an article on BASIC on Nupedia (neither finished, in-progress or on the chalkboard). —R. Koot 21:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah thats true since there's no mention of BASIC at http://nupedia.8media.org/newest.phtml , I also removed this reference from Wikipedia:Nupedia_and_Wikipedia article. 202.65.149.2 13:40, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, my apologies for reverting you since it seems you may be right; however, the claim of a link goes back as far as it's possible to know: the earliest (surviving) version of this page. OTOH, that version only claims it was written for Nupedia, not on it - maybe it was never actually submitted, and it was the author who put it here, rather than someone using the GFDL? All a bit academic, I know, but kinda interesting, in a vague way... - IMSoP 13:51, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  This seems to be the most likely explanaition. I'll try to contact him. —Ruud 13:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peter Fedorow 

message: This page looks like a tetris game. The images are all either blue or black blocks, in a uniform size. It could do with some morevaried sizes, and more main sections with less subsections. MichaelBillington 05:23, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Pictures

message: Does anyone besides me think there should be a Hello World program listed on this article that is not just an image?
 10 PRINT "Hello World"
Or for some people:
 10 PRINT "Hello World"
 20 GOTO 10
FLaRN
(talk) 18:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hello World 

message: Footnote 1 says "The acronym is tied to the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz and is not a backronym, as is sometimes suggested." Says who? We can't just make an assertion like that without a verifiable source. 81.159.56.96 01:53, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh we can as long as no one contests it. However since you have now done so we'll need to provide one. -- Derek Ross | Talk 06:06, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  About a footnote 

message: The article states that BASIC "remains popular to this day in a handful of heavily evolved dialects". If you mean VB AND VB.NET this is obvious. For other “modern versions” such as Quickbasic that still have line numbers etc this needs documentation. COBOL is still around a lot in large corporate mainframe type machines. The article needs to state outside of the VB world where and how BASIC is used in 2007 Edkollin 16:21, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Only place that I can think of outwith the VB dialects, is PIC microcontrollers eg the BASIC Stamp. -- Derek Ross | Talk 18:48, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Lotus Notes (installed base 130,000,000 seats) incorporates a BASIC dialect that is called LotusScript.  In addition to being the basis for countless applications written by IBM Lotus' customers, a great deal of the front-end functionality of Notes' built-in mail and calendaring system is implemented in it. Rhsatrhs 00:40, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Visual Basic also has line numbers.--Dojarca 14:43, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: As does QuickBASIC ... but having used the latter and assuming the former to be similar (as AFAIK its somewhat of a continuation of the same product line), they're not essential. I've seen enough QB programs, including nearly all of the included example files, that forego them completely, and just use text labels and seperate modules if they need to jump to a certain section 82.46.180.56 (talk) 16:41, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Popularity Today

message: Does it include the different/similarities between Basic and Visual Basic?  Visual Basic has totally different commands, although the first BASIC versions had relatively the same keywords.
Complex-Algorithm 00:49, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not totally different - this is easy to overstate.  Visual Basic includes If, Then, For, Next, Goto, Dim, Int, Asc, Len, End, Stop, Rem.  VB 1-6 had no console-mode support, so it's natural enough that Print and Input were missing (having said that, Print was still possible for files, for the debug object, and if used with a form object, Form1.Print, and Input was also possible with a file number).  VB.NET (version 7 onwards) reintroduced console mode but without Print and Input (although again, they can be used for file I/O, but with slightly different syntax from before).  All versions of VB, even .NET, allow optional type-declaration characters such as % and $ to be appended to variables.  VB 1-6 allow Str$, Chr$, Left$ alongside Str, Chr, Left - in .NET the $ is dropped completely.  All versions have VB have exactly the same mathematical operators (+, -, *, /, \, Mod, ^) as earlier versions of MS Basic.  All versions of VB, even 2008 beta, allow optional line numbers to be entered at the start of lines, albeit VB only allows them on certain lines, not all.  VB 1-6 include While, Wend, Gosub, Return.  VB 7 onwards have While / End While and drop Gosub. -- 86.137.136.182 (talk), 22:37, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: VBA 5 and 6 have console support and "print" coommand as well. Probably and VB have.--Dojarca 14:37, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

text: Well said. VB and other BASIC dialects have far more in common with each other than they do with other languages. It still makes sense to think of VB as one more dialect of BASIC -- even the .NET variant. -- Derek Ross | Talk 22:44, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

text: VB3 has "console-not-console" support: Print prints to the surface of a form. I don't think that Win 3.x had any console support, so this was a resonable approach.150.101.166.15 (talk) 04:51, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: VB before .NET never really had true console support, even under Win32 where it was avaiable. PRINT in VB6 still printed to a form (unless otherwise specified, and stdout was not an option). -- int19h (talk) 21:02, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Visual Basic

message: The example shown here as an example of "modern Basic" is not a modern basic in fact. It is a Basic of second generation (structured) while VisualBasic and StarBasic are basic systems of 3rd genegarion (object).--Dojarca 14:34, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern BASIC 

message: Option Explicit Off
Module stars
    Sub Main()
10:     Console.Write("What is your name: ")
15:     U$ = Console.ReadLine
20:     Console.WriteLine("Hello " + U$)
30:     Console.Write("How many stars do you want: ")
35:     N = Val(Console.ReadLine)
40:     S$ = ""
50:     For I = 1 To N
60:         S$ = S$ + "*"
70:     Next I
80:     Console.WriteLine(S$)
90:     Console.Write("Do you want more stars? ")
95:     A$ = Console.ReadLine
100:    If Len(A$) = 0 Then GoTo 90
110:    A$ = Left$(A$, 1)
120:    If A$ = "Y" Or A$ = "y" Then GoTo 30
130:    Console.Write("Goodbye ")
140:    For I = 1 To 200
150:        Console.Write(U$ + " ")
160:    Next I
170:    Console.WriteLine()
180:    End
    End Sub
End Module
Madlobster 15:53, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You do not need to separate line numbers with colon. VB supports line numbers as well.--Certh 13:33, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternate version of Visual Basic .NET version of example 

message: Historical context:      Late Seventies through early Eighties
It must be understood that the computing experience in the late 1970s through the late eighties was one continually limited by insufficient memory resources, as RAM was very expensive and typical usage was limited to text-based programs which used less memory than most medium resolution image files in today's graphical environments. 
The eighties were marked by a remaking of the industry almost top to bottom about every three years or so — today's hot company fading into obscurity almost overnight, albeit kicking and screaming. The cumulative mortality rate amongst the companies which led the way in the PC revolution — and no term was ever so apt, as life post-revolution is very different — was very high: the majority of all such companies came and went in a few years. Industry standards too, were frequently being set today and being discarded tomorrow after falling behind the next big advance. Through all the turmoil (and excitement), two constants emerged: better PCs which were a little IBM incompatible (e.g. see Z-100, Commodore PET, VIC-20 Apple IIe, and many others) failed "commercially" (meaning in the business world, though some eked out an existence in home computing) and went away; and the winner gradually became not the IBM architecture which stabilized, but the MS-DOS/PC-DOS and eventual Windows operating systems which knitted the industry together.
;Before the PC: (The PC debuted in 1981)
Because memory chips were very expensive, 8-bit computers did not have the capacity to run a memory intensive compiler-linker program. Even commercial developers were dependent upon machine-language coding and relatively crude native assemblers (see MASM, the advanced and much more capable Macro-assembler that eventually evolved). Even these simple programs still had problems with memory ceilings and file size limitations. Floppy disks were limited to about 360 kilobytes, and held not only source code files, but executable files a system needed as well.  
The only compilers in existence for microprocessors were cross-compilers, programs written on a computer (usually a minicomputer — or an even more powerful computer) that compiled non-native code for another computer platform. Native compilers became feasible only in the late days of the heyday of the IBM/AT machines when memory ceilings of around 512 kilobytes became affordable. With the advent of the 80386-based PC compatibles, many other compiled languages became available on microcomputers $mdash; provided memory was double (or better) the typical 128k or 256k RAM sold with most PCs.
I believe that the entire premise of this section is factually incorrect.
I.e., The key sentences are: 
- "Because memory chips were very expensive, 8-bit computers did not have the capacity to run a memory intensive compiler-linker program."  
- "The only compilers in existence for microprocessors were cross-compilers" 
- "Native compilers became feasible only in the late days of the heyday of the IBM/AT machines when memory ceilings of around 512 kilobytes became affordable."
Those assertions are simply not true.  In 1980 (i.e., before the first IBM PC was available, not to mention years before the AT), I was using Leor Zolman's C compiler known as BDS C, running it on a microcomputer known as the Intertec Superbrain.  This was a dual Z-80 system (the second Z-80 was used as an i/o controller) with just 64K of RAM.  I also recall using the Digital Research PL/1 compiler (known as "PL/1-80") on that same machine.  And although I was not a user of it, I think that the Mark Williams Company C compiler was also used on IBM PCs well before the AT was available, and possibly the Lattice and Whitesmiths compilers.  And Microsoft C was certainly available before the "late days" of the AT, if not even before the AT shipped.
Frankly, I'm leaning toward deleting this entire section.  Perhaps it can be re-worked to emphasize that compilers were infeasible on microcomputers in lower-end configurations used by many typical hobbiests... but I don't really see what value that fact adds to this article.
Rhsatrhs (talk) 03:06, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think deletion is the best idea. I was not happy with this section either. -- Derek Ross | Talk 04:57, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Done.  Text pasted here in case anyone wants to try to make something better from it.Rhsatrhs (talk) 02:41, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical Context? 

message: I have given a fuller description of the location so as to avoid confusion with http://www.dartmouthcollege.co.uk/bayard/int/  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.147.253.126 (talk) 16:29, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: If they want to know where it is, they can click on the link.  It's, at best, a parenthetical description, and probably should not be in the article at all.  — Arthur Rubin |  (talk) 16:43, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree. If it remains there is nothing wrong with a proper description, in fact it helps.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.147.253.126 (talk) 16:46, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Dartmouth College

message: "Newer computer systems supported time-sharing, a system which allows multiple users or processes to use the RAM and memory"
But... RAM stands for Random Access Memory. In other words, RAM is Memory.
Shouldn't it be "processor and memory" (or "CPU and RAM")?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.218.41.190 (talk) 17:58, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, RAM is memory... and ROM is memory, and Core is memory, and disc is memory and drum is memory. Computers of that era had an extremely limited amount of electronic RAM, a slightly larger amount of Core (magnetic RAM) and a much larger amount of disc- or drum-based virtual memory. Disc and drum can simulate RAM when used with paging hardware but they're not exactly RAM themselves. So RAM is always memory but memory is not always RAM. -- Derek Ross | Talk 05:28, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  What's the difference between RAM and memory? 

message: On my computer, at the top of the History section the "[Edit]" text overlaps the word "special-", pushed there I think, by the image. I don't know how to fix this, so I'm mentioning it here.  Dinoceras (talk) 09:32, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Text Clash 

message: Why does the first screenshot show Atari Basic and not the famous C64 Basic start screen? 92.105.10.244 (talk) 10:13, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: They're all famous. We tossed a coin and picked one. -- Derek Ross | Talk 16:25, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Screenshots

message: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true."
The Dijkstra quote is well-known, and verifiable; the evolution of Basic culture and its nonuse for most systems programming is verifiable in many histories of the field (a "cite" should not be provided for well-documented material that is verified elsewhere).
The Nilges book, which describes a compiler-interpreter for Quick Basic written in .Net Basic, is I think worthy for inclusion because it's the exception that proves the rule. But it needs a cite, and a cite was provided.
:Trouble is you're repeating stuff that's already in the article. We already mention Dijkstra's quote. So why mention it again ? As for the non-use of BASIC for systems programming, well, everyone used or uses C for systems programming don't they ? So BASIC is only one of many languages (most of them in fact) not intended for systems programming. So again, why mention it? Surely it makes more sense to mention that a language is intended for systems programming than that it isn't since that is the exceptional case. In any case, whatever the initial intention, BASIC has been and still is used for systems programming in a very few situations, including the occasional creation of systems programming tools. For instance STAMP controllers have been around for twenty years plus, PowerBASIC for almost that long. The use of BASIC for systems programming is easily verifiable. QuickBASIC itself has been used for systems programming including for writing its own compiler (check out XBASIC or Freebasic both of which are extended QuickBASIC compilers written in extended QuickBASIC), so the fact that somebody has used .NET Basic to compile a subset of QuickBASIC isn't particularly interesting, far less some sort of exception. It actually sounds to me as if you're spamming the article to plug the Nilges book (although I realise that that's unlikely given the age of the book) and I'd support removing your additions from the article on that basis alone, never mind the duplication of already existing info. -- Derek Ross | Talk 07:12, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: By the way, I just checked and you got the Dijkstra quote wrong. He said that "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence". So, wrong language. Please try reading the article and all of its footnotes before making any more changes. If you had already done so, you would have been able to discover what Dijkstra really said about BASIC. -- Derek Ross | Talk 08:34, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion of revert to "Basic Culture and Computing Culture"

message: The article contradicts itself on the year BASIC was first developed:  1963 vs. 1964. Kdammers (talk) 10:26, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Birth Date 

message: There is an overuse of non-free images. Considering 3 of the 4 images only have 1 letter difference in the entire image, I doubt these all qualify for non-free use in the article, and the last is just a different version name. One image would be enough to give a basic idea of the IBM BASIC. Unless anyone can point out an outstanding reason for having four images which can be condensed in to one image, 3 of the 4 can be removed. SpigotWho? 14:28, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  NON-FREE Image use in this article. 

message: The VB.NET sample is not very good. It could be compacter. But editing the sample is not possible. A lot of HTML commands (see wiki source) makes editing the sample impossible. :-( --Filzstift (talk) 10:23, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: VB.NET-Sample

message: I think GE Commercial Time-Sharing deserves at least an acknowledgement. I was involved in it at the very beginning. The Dartmouth BASIC ran on what was called a GE-265 computer which was, in fact, a GE-235 computer working with a device called, if memory does not fail me, a Datanet 30. I believe that the Datanet was developed for telephone switching. It made the time-sharing possible. GE bought the rights to use the Dartmouth design and went into the commercial time-sharing businees. But before they went public they rebuilt the system to make it sturdy enough to use commercially.
The original setup was a compiler. The input-output system was punched paper tape. So people would write their programs offline and put them on punched paper tape. Then paper tape was fed in at the user's console (a teletype), compiled and run. Output, if any, was punched out at the teletype.
After GE got the program four of us entirely rewrote it in a couple of months. I did the computational part of the compiler. The GE-235 was a very weird computer and programming for it (in its machine language, of course) was a strange experience. The original Dartmouth implementation was, to put it politely, student term papers. I cannot believe the time trials mentioned in the text were run on the real original BASIC - I suspect nobody knew that GE had completely rewritten it. GE kept calling their BASIC Dartmouth BASIC for quite some time.  It is entirely possible that GE management was not aware it had been rewritten.   
DKleinecke (talk) 20:28, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  The early days of BASIC 

message: The section Maturity: the personal computer era is far below any acceptable standard:
:1. BASIC's fortunes reversed once again with the introduction of Visual Basic by Microsoft.
::yeah! (Except a little too heroically written: "fortunes")
:2. It is somewhat difficult to consider this language to be BASIC[neutrality is disputed], because of the major shift in its orientation towards an object-oriented and event-driven perspective[citation needed].
::no and no: it wasn't object-oriented and so it is in fact very easy to consider,
:3. The only significant similarity to older BASIC dialects was familiar syntax.
::which uses to define a programming language, and as far as I can remember, it executed as a BASIC too, and so was a good-old BASIC, except cleaned up and tidied for some structured programming,
:4. Syntax itself no longer "fully defined" the language, since much development was done using "drag and drop" methods without exposing all code for commonly used objects such as buttons and scrollbars to the developer.
::which is the worst garbage in the section: a programming language is defined by its syntax, not by any happenstance IDE - if it were, gcc perusing emacs and gmake would be quite another language than gcc perusing gedit and another make, but in fact gcc is C, whatever IDE/editor/make system that is used.
There's certainly more, but the text needs to be on level with computer science, not an amateur BASIC-only heroic saga. Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 20:45, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Forgot to say: this refers to VB before VB.NET, which was what the section was about. VB.NET is allegedly better, so maybe it is. Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 20:47, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

text: The VB compiler understands the syntax of FRM files. The QuickBASIC compiler doesn't. The VBDOS compiler had the same variable scoping rules as QuickBASIC, so it could also compile QuickBASIC code. However the VBwin compilers treated variable scope differently, so they could not compile QuickBASIC code. In addition the events associated with VB forms led to a very different programming style from the one used for QuickBASIC. There is more to a programming language than syntax. Scoping, events and available data types are also key. Syntax of Algol, Pascal and Modula are all fairly similar. The big differences lie elsewhere. The same is true of different generations of BASIC. And yes, agreed. The IDE has nothing to do with anything. The VB IDE hides the true syntax of FRM files but there is nothing stopping anyone from using Notepad to see their real nature or indeed to edit them provided that they have been saved as text. -- Derek Ross | Talk 00:04, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Maturity: the personal computer era

message: Hi, I've just hacked out a fair bit of text. If it belongs anywhere, it should be in Dartmouth BASIC article. I'll be looking at tidying up the rest of the article too in the coming days. Snori (talk) 17:36, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Trim

message: "More important were the facilities for structured programming..." Sez who?! In an encyclopedia, what's a value-judgment doing in the article?! What if I'm someone who thinks graphics extensions are far more important than satisfying the "kerrect programming" requirements according to Dickstra? Just like Wikipedia to reflect the opinions of Unixtoxicated text-only "correct"-programming weenies... 46.117.126.215 (talk) 01:13, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  More important to whom? 

message: This article before I fixed it claimed that BASIC was strongly typed.  This is a false claim.  There are versions of BASIC which are not typed at all.  The runtime machine determins the type on the fly and it can switch it back and forth as needed.  So a string can become a numeric and then back to a string, a file pointer can be examined as a text string, a list pointer can be as well.  That's not a strongly typed language.  Although I agree there are some versions of BASIC which are in fact strongly typed, not all of them are, and this article is on all of them, not some.Wjhonson (talk) 21:39, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The original language was strongly typed. It differentiated between string variables and floating point numeric variables. Conversions between the two types required conversion functions and the results had to be stored in a variable of the correct type. Later dialects added integer variables of various sizes and assorted types such as Boolean. However I'm not aware of any weakly typed or untyped dialects until VB for Windows was introduced in the mid 1990s. Perhaps you can name some that existed in the 1980s or before. Even today when a few untyped variants exist, the majority of implementations are strongly typed. So I don't think that it's a completely false claim. Merely one which is no longer as true as it was. -- Derek Ross | Talk 22:12, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

text: And the ANSI/ISO definition of the language specifies it as a strongly typed language. So it might be more accurate to say that the language is strongly typed but that non-conformant implementations that allow untyped variables exist. -- Derek Ross | Talk 22:23, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typing 

message: This article also does not seem to cover BASIC as a language running thousands of small businesses in the 1970s and 1980s.  Instead it focusing on home computer use.  That section should be introduced.Wjhonson (talk) 21:44, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I Second the motion, I would like to hear from people who created hundreds (I think) of Business programs used world-wide in Basic-like lang...Gcavazos (talk) 02:58, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  BASIC used in business

message: Yes, the article has Dijkstra's famous "mentally mutilated" comment. But,
*What, specifically, about BASIC causes the mutilation?  
*Have computer science pedagogues reached any sort of consensus about better tools and methods for introducing young students to programming?
24.229.124.203 (talk) 06:00, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: We discussed the "mental mutilation" years ago. Check the archives for this talk page for a possible reason. -- Derek Ross | Talk 13:36, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need an improved/expanded criticism section 

message: The earliest date given here is 1964.  But I was introduced to something that was called Basic before I entered "Adavanced Level" grades - which can be no later than July 1962.  This was part of an ICT educational outreach programme.  The language structure of the subsection I saw was very similar to the Basic from Dartmouth College.  In principle this should be referenceable and therefore included - but I could find nothing.  Can anyone help? PhysicistQuery (talk) 16:11, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confused 

message: In this article Time sharing and batch systems are explained as  the same type of system.
Multitasking does not equal time sharing system.  Time Sharing is multiple interactive users sharing a computers respurces. True multitasking is required. However a multitasking batch system does not support user interaction with batch jobs.
The issue may be clouded on the DEC-System-Ten for example. On the TOPS-10 operatoring system BATCH jobs were run by a program. The batch control program usually ran privileged on the operators terminal.Steamerandy (talk) 08:44, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I've just tidied up the history section to clarify in a way that makes sense for this article. Snori (talk) 23:37, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Time Sharing vs Batch

message: "In 1975 MITS released Altair BASIC, developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen as the company Micro-Soft,"  Shouldn't this be "... at  the company..."? Kdammers (talk) 22:46, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: No. Initially Gates and Allen were the company. Jeh (talk) 23:00, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Micro-Soft 

message: Hi boys, hello girls! I removed the trivia section as is recommended here.--Jimmy Olano (talk) 20:34, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trivia section 

message: Accordingly Wiki type of Pages refer to programming languages that are programmed in basic to allow for an asnii shell using homonyms and ciphers to correlate "their" information using hacker software compatible with Google Translator. This software does not come from anything else other than Canopy, a derivative of Filmhouse located in Ohio.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A000:1301:877E:96C0:E216:4649:62A9 (talk) 23:53, 5 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Ummm... This resembles English but English generated by a random text generator. It has syntax but seems to be devoid of meaning. -- Derek Ross | Talk 03:31, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Legal Status 

message: "I think Dijkstra, God rest his soul, was entirely wrong about that. I know so many really good programmers who got their start programming BASIC because that’s what was available to them." -Joshua Bloch in Coders at Work (page 170)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Top programmers such as Jamie Zawinski and Brad Fitzpatrick started with BASIC.
Joshua Bloch himself did lots of BASIC: "I was programming in BASIC, like everybody else back then, from about 1973 through 1976. That’s when I got seriously into it (programming)." -Same book
Alfredo Valente (talk) 15:24, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  please add this quote to balance it 

message: Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code[2] or Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
The only difference between these two appears to be a single-quote after the S. I don't believe that requires both to be written out~ Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:47, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Am I missing something here? 

message: Is there a Wikipedia article that discusses the kind of tokenization used many BASIC dialects?
My understanding is:
* (a) When typing in lines of a program or loading a program from disk/cassette, common keywords such as "PRINT", "IF(" (including the opening parenthesis), "GOSUB", etc. are recognized and stored as a single byte or two in RAM, some or all spaces were discarded, line numbers and internal decimal numbers are converted to internal binary format(s), etc.
* (b) When listing the program with LIST or storing a program to disk/cassette, those tokens are expanded back to the full human-readable name of the keyword, spaces were inserted as necessary, those binary values are printed out in decimal, etc.
Some articles (such as the "Applesoft BASIC" article) link to tokenization (lexical analysis),
which is closely related but not exactly the same -- that article
covers the sort of thing done in compilers similar to (a),
but that article says nothing about (b), which compilers never do,
but practically every BASIC dialect mentioned in the "List of computers with on-board BASIC" article does.
The source-code editor article briefly mentions "tokenizing editors" that do both (a) and (b).
Should *this* "BASIC" article have a section on tokenization, or is there already some other article that discusses it?
--DavidCary (talk) 17:40, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I now see that BASIC interpreter#Tokenizing and encoding lines discusses such tokenization, but I still wonder -- do any other non-BASIC languages do such tokenization? --DavidCary (talk) 04:29, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  tokenization 

message: There is a typo  in a note.  '(of even' should read '(or even'  -- I don't know how to make the correction, since the notes section does not show the notes. Kdammers (talk) 14:54, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: . Hint: The edit has to be done where the note is added, not in the notes section. NJD-DE (talk) 15:03, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typo 

message: In the "Origin" section, the statement "While Kurtz was visiting MIT, Marvin Minsky suggested that time-sharing offered a solution" is not supported by the reference (the Time magazine article). I can't find any support that it was Minsky Kurtz met, but the Rankin reference from DTSS does state that Kurtz met John McCarthy, also working in AI at MIT at the time. I will update the article to correct this apparent error and add the reference.
Cjs (talk) 03:32, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  MIT, Minsky and McCarthy 

message: This "Commodore BASIC v2.0 (1977) on the Commodore 64" looks like ATARI Basic to me. Either the screenshot or the caption is wrong.
Griggorio2 (talk) 17:49, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infobox screenshot 

message: In this article (as often elsewhere) terms are used that are thought to be common knowledge by contributors, but might be unknown to newbies (and might become unknown to general public of later generations ;-), so I am adding links to apropriate articles to some that catch my eye. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 07:45, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  I am adding some links 

message: I want to find it's timeline 103.255.6.77 (talk) 16:39, 30 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  It's timeline 

message: I remember reading an article many, MANY, years ago, (in Byte magazine?) where the person/people who invented the Basic language mentioned that "Basic" is NOT an acronym but a proper noun - a language that was intended to be "basic" when compared to things like FORTRAN and COBOL.
At the time, (the 70's) it was the vogue for programming languages to be acronyms - FORTRAN, COBOL, APL, LISP, etc. - and people kept asking what "Basic" was an acronym for - and the folks at Dartmouth kept saying "It's not an acronym!" until someone decided to make it an acronym.  The existing acronym has nothing to do with the origins of the language or its original name.
Unfortunately, I read this many years ago and I have not found a citation for this, but I can assure you it's gospel truth.
Jharris1993 (talk) 16:20, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Basic" was not intended to be an acronym 

message: The article mentions the MAT INPUT statement. I can recall at university, in 1973, there was an HP calculator that supported this. It also had a MAT PRINT function, that would print out the array. We used it to generate and then print out 3 X 3 magic squares. Wow, that was nearly 50 years ago. 2001:8003:E41C:1C01:8416:B98E:59:E8A8 (talk) 11:52, 18 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  MAT statements