question about ORIGINAL BAISC

[gillen15]

I mean like the first original basic. My question is: How different is it from other types of basic? there are lots of help topics for other types but which one is closest?

[btiffin]

Ahh, good old BASIC. <To be written in Sarcastica font>

code:

10 cls 20 print "Hello "; 30 goto 20

Very little structure, no objects, good old line numbers and goto. Early BASICs did have GOSUB <linenumber> and RETURN but not an ELSE clause for IF THEN. Variable names limited to 1 maybe 2 characters. With $ signs required for variables that held strings. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of the evolution.

Labelled code didn't come until after the Level-II extensions on original TRS-80 machines and their ilk.

Be glad of the works of Niklaus Wirth. He pressured the pedagogic programming field into directions that we all benefit from. And be happy the "good old days" became the "better now days".

And to be honest, I kinda wish Bill Gates knew more about and followed McCarthy, Kay or even Backus and Hopper before Kemeny and Kurtz. The world might be a completely different place.

Cheers

[Sniper4Life]

ya i was wondering a bit bout this too
cus today i started dual-booting with linux and i saw a program i could download called Basic-256

and the online article with it said that Basic explains HOW a computer thinks not HOW to program
so i was thinking this is just what i needed

so could anyone explain Basic a bit for me?

[Sniper4Life]

all things i see on google to do with basic are like QBasic or Visual Basic so i was looking for help with the original basic

just like gilen 15

[Homer_simpson]

basic is wicked, the first programming language i used was on a commodore 64 basic 2.0

[[Gandalf]]

Sniper4Life @ 2009-05-07, 2:25 pm wrote:

all things i see on google to do with basic are like QBasic or Visual Basic so i was looking for help with the original basic

Well, QuickBASIC is very close to the 'original' BASIC, depending on what exactly you mean by 'original'. Most code is identical, with a few limitations removed and some additions.

[Sniper4Life]

k thanks

more of the questions in my head are more about how a computer works...not the syntax of a language...