h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"BASIC still Exists today as Visual BASIC, a Object Oriented language developed by Micrsoft, though it is nowhere near as popular as many of the other OOP langauges."

BASIC still exists in it's original states as well. Microsoft QBASIC, XBASIC and all the other compilers are avaliable to buy or download.

Visual BASIC is as popular as the other languages. It is easier to learn, simpler, and is used by many new programmers as thier language of choice.

BASIC will never die!

I personally think QBasic is far better than Turbo Pascal.
But do I get a choice at school? No.

It's not even close to the popularity that BASIC held up until 1988 or so.
I remember being taught BASIC in elementary school, something that just doesn't happen anymore.
I forgot that Microsoft did have qbasic around, I will have to change the guide entry

There is an even more important version of basic that fails to get a mention. in the early 80's the bbc decided that they needed a microcomputer for their computer literacy scheme.

This became the bbc micro, and later the archimedes, both of which ran an advanced basic called BBC Basic. This had support for repeat / until, if / then / else, and named functions and procedures from day 1.

In version 5, it had support for libraries, case statements, milti-line if / then / else constructs, and a number of other usefull facilities.

It also included an integrated in line assembler for whichever processor it happened to run on, which included 6502, z80, 32016, 80x86 and the entire family of risc chips developed by arm ltd.

This makes it a full featured and modern language which is very good for idea development, while being simple to convert to C if you need extra facilities not in the language.

It is so quick and easy to use that I still use it for the initial development of web software, data processing programs, etc.

after doing this, and converting the resulting program to C (but only if it needs it), it still works out faster than doing the development in C.

strange that.