A Conversation for BASIC Programming Language
A579855 - BASIC Programming Language
Johnny Regular Started conversation Oct 4, 2001
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A579855
I've worked on this for a few months now and I think it is ready for the big time. Lots of research went into it (the lucky thing about working at a museum is all the free library time) and I think it would make a good addition. Let me know what ya'll think.
Thanks
A579855 - BASIC Programming Language
il viaggiatore Posted Oct 4, 2001
how about some dates. You say "as time passed..." and "about the same time..." and I wondered when that was.
You misspelled definitive.
A579855 - BASIC Programming Language
Will Of God Posted Oct 5, 2001
BASIC wasn't created out of the thin air. It was a subset of Fortran. Kurtz and Kemeny thought FORTRAN was too complex for beginners (and they were right) so they boiled down the langauge into the simple, needed parts.
A579855 - BASIC Programming Language
HappyDude Posted Oct 8, 2001
no mention of the Sinclair microcomputers ?
A579855 - BASIC Programming Language
Gnomon - time to move on Posted Oct 8, 2001
I think the first sentence would be better phrased as "In the early days of computing" rather than "Since..." because what you are describing no longer takes place.
"Kurtz would refute the claim" should be "Kurtz would deny the claim". "Refutes" means he provides proof tht it is not true.
A mention of the Sinclairs would certainly be worth doing. When Uncle Clive brought out his Sinclair Spectrum, he was much criticised for continuing to use a non-standard BASIC. His reply was that since there were more ZX-80 and ZX-81 computers in the world than all the other computers put together, his BASIC could be considered a standard!
BASIC is quite obviously a stripped-down version of Fortran, to anyone who knows both languages.
You might like to mention that Microsoft's BASIC for MS-DOS was called GW-BASIC and that the GW stood for Gee Whizz.
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h2g2 auto-messages Posted Oct 16, 2001
Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'Peer Review' to 'BASIC Programming Language'.
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Frankie Roberto Posted Oct 29, 2001
Just a quick note to say that I've just picked up this entry and will be sub-editing it over the next few weeks. I will be taking all of the comments written on this thread into account and will credit researchers accordingly...
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