Talk:BASIC

There is hardly any mention in this article of the use of BASIC on the timesharing minicomputers of the 1970s and 1980s. Systems such as the MAI Basic Four and Point 4 had a highly optimized form of BASIC that was designed for interaction with a timesharing operating system, and hundreds of thousands of these systems were sold worldwide.

In the early 1980s, companies like Basis International (BBx) and Concept Omega (Thoroughbred) developed timesharing BASIC implementations that would run on UNIX. These UNIX implementations remain in use to this day, often running code that was developed back when Ronald Reagan was president of the USA.

As for Visual Basic, that is an aberration and not at all representative of what BASIC is all about.

38.69.12.5 (talk) 23:19, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Well go ahead and add it then. Sounds like it would be a good addition to the article and you obviously know more about it than most of us. -- Derek Ross | Talk 01:05, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, go ahead and add it... As long as there are good references.

BASIC also enjoyed widespread use on the PDP-11 under RSTS/E. Jeh (talk) 01:24, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

"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)

No. Initially Gates and Allen were the company. Jeh (talk) 23:00, 8 June 2016 (UTC)

Reviewer: TheDragonFire (talk · contribs) 06:04, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:BASIC/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it well written?

   A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:

   B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:

2. Is it verifiable with no original research?

   A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:

   Ideally, by the end of this process, all general citations will be converted into inline citations, and the notes sections will either be expanded or the two notes will be squashed into the body of the article.

   B. All in-line citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines:

   C. It contains no original research:

   As per above, this is difficult to verify without better sourcing.

   D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:

   Apart from one case of WP:CIRCULAR, Earwig's Copyvio Detector reports no issues.

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:

   B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):

4. Is it neutral?

   It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:

   There seems to be a fair bit of editorialising, and inappropriate tone.

5. Is it stable?

   It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:

6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content:

   B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

@SurenaIVY: I'm sorry this is taking a while. If you're able to help address some of these issues, and those tagged in the article, that would be appreciated. TheDragonFire (talk) 06:35, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Given that the nominator's only edit was to nominate this, it's clear to me he's not coming back. That being said, none of the issues you addressed have been resolved, as this is still woefully underreferenced. As a result I'm failing this nom. Wizardman 23:47, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

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

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)

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)

"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)

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)

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)

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)

Any such discussion should make it clear that the "tokenization" done by such BASICS, at least in the Microsoft versions, is not the lexical analysis, or at least not all of it. The final lexical analysis is done by the interpreter on the result of the "CRUNCH" routine, and many lexical units are still multiple characters at that point. I've done some original research in this area; feel free to contact me for further information on this if you like. Cjs (talk) 03:27, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

The tokenization was really just a microcomputer interpreter thing, owing to the lack of memory on early micros. I don't think that minicomputer or mainframe BASICs used it. And although BASIC compilers could handle it, they didn't require it. -- Derek Ross | Talk 16:48, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Yes, to this day, most BASICs support (but frown on) the use of the '?' for "PRINT". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:8003:E41C:1C01:8416:B98E:59:E8A8 (talk) 11:53, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

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)

 Done. 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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

Jerold Zacharias sponsored a series of talks at MIT on Computers in Education in the late 60's. During John Kemeny's talk I remember that he made an aside to say that Basic was an Algol derivative, because array indexes started at zero, instead of 1 like Fortran. This seems, perhaps, a minor point, but whether to start counting at 1 or zero was, and remains, a source of trouble. I noticed that the article mentions that Basic was influenced by Fortran II. Should it also say something about the influence of Algol? AJim (talk) 05:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)