What is the full form of BASIC

BASIC: Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

BASIC stands for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is one of the simplest and earliest high-level programming languages supported in all operating systems. John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in 1964, with the purpose that all students should be able to use the computers in every field and originally designed as an interactive mainframe timesharing language. As at that time, the use of a computer requires custom software which was not easy to learn for ordinary people. With the introduction of BASIC, people started developing custom software on their personnel computers for their business, profession, etc.

Nowadays, BASIC is only used to teach the fundamentals of programming. To instruct the computer in what sequence to execute the instructions, BASIC initially used numbers at the start of each instruction (or line). The lines would be numbered 10, 20, 30, etc., so that subsequently, if necessary, further instructions might be added between orders. Programs could loop back to earlier instructions throughout execution thanks to "GOTO" declarations. for example, an "if" clause on line 230 of a BASIC programme, for instance, would instruct the computer to return to line 50 if a variable's value is less than 10. This command might seem as follows:

230 IF (N < 10) THEN GOTO 50

Modern BASIC programmes employ "while loops," which carry out a series of instructions so long as a specific condition is true. More data types, including integers, strings, and arrays, are supported by newer BASIC programming tools for storing variables and other data. Today's BASIC programming software enables developers to design a large portion of their programmes visually, utilising a graphical user interface, in contrast to the earliest BASIC development environments, which were solely text-based. REALbasic and Microsoft Visual Basic are two of the more widely used BASIC development tools.

Because it is simple to learn, its statements are simple for other programmers to read, and it is supported by the majority of operating systems, BASIC is still used worldwide (OS). The documentation for BASIC has been translated into many different national languages. It frequently includes sound and graphic assistance. QBASIC is a common version of BASIC nowadays.

As more potent microcomputers hit the market and programming languages with greater capabilities (like Pascal and C) became practical, BASIC's appeal waned in the 1990s. A newer version of BASIC and a visual form builder were combined when Microsoft published Visual Basic in 1991. This rekindled language usage and "VB" is still a widely used programming language today in the forms of VBA and VB.NET.

QuickBasic (QB) is the compiler for the BASIC developed by Microsoft in 1985 which runs mainly on DOS.

History

DartmouthBasic was implemented under their direction by a team of students of Dartmouth College. It was mainly designed for people who were not from a mathematical background.

Earlier it was made available free of cost for the language to become popular. To promote the language among students they made it available in schools. In the 1960s it became chargeable.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic (VB) came into existence in 1991 by Microsoft. It was an evolution of QuickBasic including many other languages. It incorporated both object-oriented constructs from those other languages, such as "With" and "For Each," as well as constructs from that language, such as block-structured control statements, parameterized subroutines, and optional static typing. The language still had several features that were compatible with its predecessors, like the optional line numbers that could be used to find problems and the Dim keyword for declarations and "Gosub"/Return instructions. The need for a new macro language for the spreadsheet application Microsoft Excel served as a major reason for the creation of Visual Basic.

BASIC, treated as a beginner's language was helpful in creating small applications and was considered very much stable.

Microsoft introduced VBScript in 1996 and Visual Basic .NET in 2001 which resembles Java and C# but have syntax that of the original basic language.