Computers: Universe: UniVerse Basic

BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It's first implementation was designed by Dartsmouth University and is now known as Dartsmouth Basic.

It was originally designed as a teaching tool, but its adoption by the early home computers (such as the little black plastic Sinclair ZX81, for a long time the world's selling computer) established it as the best known of all computer languages. The machine which finally outsold Sinclair, the IBM PC, used to run GW-BASIC (GW standing for 'Gee Whiz' would you believe) from ROM if there was no MS-DOS floppy in the drive. Microsoft's heavy promotion of Visual Basic, and it's integration into the Office suite, completes the cycle of what is arguably the world's most successful programming language.

Successful, but much maligned. Many technologists still regard Basic as a lightweight development language: or as unstructured and encouraging poor programming practice.

The pity is that these are criticisms based largely on an understanding of the original Dartsmouth Basic and the various 'home computer' implementations it inspired. Even applied to these languages, this view is misplaced. These early versions of Basic aimed to be, above all, to be usable by the novice. They used interpreters rather than compilers, largely because of the ease this brought to development and debugging (even now, most debuggers are essentially interpreters applied to compiled languages, allowing you to execute code a line at a time and inspect variable values: which you could do with interpreted Basic without a debugger). A user completely new to computers would typically be wrting simple programs within hours of getting his computer home from the store. Early Basics were designed for beginners, and was extremely well suited to its task.

The disdain of Basic becomes even more unreasonable, though, when applied to its modern forms. Good Basic compilers have allowed Basic programs to attain the speed necessary for serious applications. Structured programming techniques have long since become an integral part of the language. It is true that Basic still supports that bete noire of coding style gurus, the GOTO unconditional jump, but then so do C and Pascal: the latter being the language designed specifically designed to teach structured programming. There is no obligation to use GOTO in any of these languages, however.

In short, I am asking you to put aside any preconceptions you may have about languages with the word Basic in their names. UniVerse Basic is a particularly strong and well structured implementation of the language, and retains an astounding ease of use and transparency: the true heritage of Dartsmouth Basic.