BASIC facts for kids

BASIC is one of the first programming languages ever created. It was first used on early computers. The name BASIC is an acronym, which means it's a word made from the first letters of other words. It stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

A special version of BASIC is called Blitz BASIC. It is made just for coding games.

History of BASIC

BASIC was created by John George Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1963. They wanted to make a programming language that was easy for everyone to use. It was inspired by another language called Fortran.

Kemeny and Kurtz designed BASIC with eight main ideas in mind:

• It should be easy for beginners to learn.
• It should be a general-purpose programming language, meaning it could be used for many different types of programs.
• It should allow experienced programmers to add more advanced features.
• It should be interactive, so you could give commands and get results right away.
• It should give clear and helpful error messages if something went wrong.
• It should work quickly for small programs.
• You shouldn't need to know a lot about the computer's computer hardware to use it.
• It should stop users from accidentally changing the computer's main operating system.

The creators made the first BASIC compiler free. This helped many people get interested in using the language. Since then, many other compilers and interpreters have been made for BASIC.

How BASIC Code Looks

Here is a simple example of BASIC code: for x=9/3*9+9
print x
next x

This code will print the number 36 on the screen.

Images for kids

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  The HP 2000 system was designed to run time-shared BASIC as its primary task.

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  Commodore BASIC v2.0 on the Commodore 64

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  MSX BASIC version 3.0

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  "Train Basic every day!"—reads a poster (bottom center) in a Russian school (c. 1985–1986)

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  IBM Cassette BASIC 1.10

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  Three modern Basic variants: Mono Basic, OpenOffice.org Basic and Gambas

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  BASIC came to some video game systems, such as the Nintendo Famicom.

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  A simple game implemented in BASIC

See also

In Spanish: BASIC para niños