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

A645121 BASIC - the Programming Language

A few little curator changes required to tidy this up:

there were two proud, but separate traditions -- remove the comma

until after the print out had been returned
-- print out should be printout

Microsoft, released their version of BASIC -- remove the comma

for all the work they had put into BASIC for the Altair had resulted in income of two US dollars an hour
-- remove the word "for" from the start of this

Occasionally written to BBasiC

-- change "to" to "as"

put the final nail in the glory days of BASIC
-->
put the final nail in the coffin of the glory days of BASIC

object-orientated programming languages
-->
object-oriented programming languages

"put the final nail in the coffin of the glory days" is a bit of a clumsy metaphor, don't you think?

Yes. Any suggestions?

"put an end to the glory days" is better. As Basic didn't disappear completely, the coffin nail analogy is inappropriate.

I also have an aversion to writing BASIC in upper case. I know it's common, but the English language tends to assimilate these acronyms into proper nouns over time, and I see no reason we should treat it any different to Fortran (A87607597)

I have amended all Gnomon's suggestions but I don't know what to do about Icy's last comment. Is there anything else that requires changing in the Entry?

GB

I don't think so. While I agree with Icy that BASIC looks very clumsy, it is the normal way of referring to the language, so it is not wrong.