![]() They also made it available to high schools in the Dartmouth area and put a considerable amount of effort into promoting the language. ![]() The designers of the language decided to make the compiler available without charge so that the language would become widespread. It was also quite efficient, beating FORTRAN II and ALGOL 60 implementations on the 265 at several fairly computationally intensive programming problems such as maximization Simpson's Rule. Contrary to popular belief, it was a compiled language at the time of its introduction. BASIC was first implemented on the GE-265 mainframe which supported multiple terminals. Initially, BASIC concentrated on supporting straightforward mathematical work, with matrix arithmetic support from its initial implementation as a batch language and full string functionality being added by 1965. It had been preceded by other teaching-language experiments at Dartmouth such as the DARSIMCO (1956) and DOPE (1962 implementations of SAP and DART (1963) which was a simplified FORTRAN II). (The features of other time-sharing systems such as JOSS and CORC, and to a lesser extent LISP, were also considered). The language was based partly on FORTRAN II and partly on ALGOL 60, with additions to make it suitable for timesharing. ![]() Shield the user from the operating system.Not require an understanding of computer hardware.Provide clear and friendly error messages.Allow advanced features to be added for experts (while keeping the language simple for beginners).Be a general-purpose programming language.The eight design principles of BASIC were: In the following years, as other dialects of BASIC appeared, Kemeny and Kurtz' original BASIC dialect became known as Dartmouth BASIC. Being able to use a computer to support teaching and research was quite attractive enough. It intended to address the complexity issues of older languages with a new language design specifically for the new class of users time-sharing systems allowed - that is, a less technical user who did not have the mathematical background of the more traditional users and was not interested in acquiring it. BASIC was designed to allow students to write programs for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. The original BASIC language was designed in 1963 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction. In theory, timesharing reduced the cost of computing tremendously, as a single machine could be shared among (up to) hundreds of users. The machines had become fast enough that most users could feel they had the machine all to themselves. In such a system the operating system alternates between running processes, giving each one running time on the CPU before switching to another. Newer computer systems supported time-sharing, a system which allows multiple users or processes to use the CPU and memory. In general, these specialized languages were difficult to use and had widely disparate syntax.Īs prices decreased, the possibility of sharing computer access began to move from research labs to commercial use. Since even the newer less expensive machines were still major investments, there was strong tendency to consider efficiency (ie, execution speed, and such) to be the most important feature of a language. Programming languages in the batch programming era tended to be designed, like the machines on which they ran, for specific purposes (such as scientific formula calculations or business data processing or eventually for text editing). ![]() With this extra processing power, computers would sometimes sit idle, without jobs to run. During the 1960s, however, faster and more affordable computers became available. A simple batch processing arrangement ran only a single "job" at a time, one after another. Prior to the mid-1960s, computers were extremely expensive tools used only for special-purpose tasks. The language (in one variant or another) became widespread on home microcomputers in the 1980s, and remains popular to this day in a handful of heavily evolved dialects. At the time, nearly all computer use required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. It was originally designed in 1963, by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College, to provide access for non-science students to computers. In computer programming, BASIC (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) refers to a family of high-level programming languages. ![]()
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