Concept in Definition ABC

For many years, when the golden age of eight-bit microcomputers, this language of programming was the gateway for many people to the exciting world of the computing, and although today it has fallen into disuse for many things in favor of more powerful languages ​​such as C ++ among others, BASIC is still a reference for beginners or amateur programming.

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language designed for easy learning and use.

The first version of this language was introduced in 1964, a very early date in the context of the rise of modern computing. His goal was to make it as easy as possible drafting of programs for the then gigantic mainframes, the computers of the time.

It also represented one of the first efforts to create tools that were adapted to the interactivity of computers in real time, something that technology did very recently allowed.

In this sense, BASIC has two modes of operation: interpreted and compiled.

In interpreted mode, the "interpreter" parses and executes the program line by line, while in compiled mode the standard procedure for creating a file executable that does not need any interpreter to to run in the system.

Furthermore, the BASIC structuring is very flexible; surely, who else who less, all of us of a certain age have seen BASIC lists in which each line of code It was numbered, with a numbering that usually jumped from 10 to 10.

For example, the typical interpreted "hello world" in BASIC could be:

10 CLS
20 PRINT "hello world"
30 GOTO 20

What the GOTO instruction does is return to a specific line number and continue execution from that line number.

This resource, that of the GOTO instruction, widely used in BASIC, is not accepted as a correct practice in structured programming, in which this construction is replaced by the use of functions and procedures.

These are also available in BASIC, in versions like Visual basic from Microsoft.

The latter was the one that popularized the language in computers with the environment graphic and the operating system Windows, from version 3.0 of said programming environment. Before, however, BASIC had its golden age in the eight-bit microcomputer era.

The vast majority of eight-bit computers "hid" their operating system under an interpreter of BASIC commands, so that it acted as a command line, being the interface with which the users.

This role ceased to be one with the advent of PCs compatible with the original IBM PC, which already used some DOS as an operating system. Even so, the popularity of BASIC led to several versions of DOS, such as Microsoft's, incorporating a small interpreter for this language, initially GW-BASIC and later QBasic.

Visual Basic represented the climax in the use of BASIC as a serious programming language, later integrating in the Visual Studio package, with which the option to use BASIC became one more along with C and others idioms.

Starting in the 90s, the use of BASIC declined significantly, and the final touchstone to this simplistic language has been given by languages ​​such as Java and by the diversification of device formats, with the emergence of mobile devices such as smartphones.

BASIC continues to survive today, with modern developments such as the Gambas environment or the different Visual Studio, but it has lost its user base due to the explosion of programming languages ​​and the boom in Internet.

In this sense, BASIC is not adapted to the online world, and although it has a handful of implementations for mobile devices, it is not optimized for it.

However, it is still an excellent option to enter the exciting world of programming.

Photos: Fotolia - Alla72 / Casimiro

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