meaning of basic

1. Relating to a base; performing the office of a base in a salt.
2. Having the base in excess, or the amount of the base atomically greater than that of the acid, or exceeding in proportion that of the related neutral salt.
3. Apparently alkaline, as certain normal salts which exhibit alkaline reactions with test paper.
4. Said of crystalline rocks which contain a relatively low percentage of silica, as basalt.
5. BASIC Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. A simple language oroginally designed for ease of programming by students and beginners. BASIC exists in many dialects, and is popular on microcomputers with sound and graphics support. Most micro versions are interactive and interpreted. BASIC has become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case like Pascal of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs on the order of 10-20 lines very easily; writing anything longer is a very painful, and b encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldnt be so bad if historical accidents hadnt made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year. Originally, all references to code, both GOTO and GOSUB subroutine call referred to the destination by its line number. This allowed for very simple editing in the days before text editors were considered essential. Just typing the line number deleted the line and to edit a line you just typed the new line with the same number. Programs were typically numbered in steps of ten to allow for insertions. Later versions, such as BASIC V, allow GOTO-less structured programming with named procedures and functions, IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF constructs and WHILE loops etc. Early BASICs had no graphic operations except with graphic characters. In the 1970s BASIC interpreters became standard features in mainframes and minicomputers. Some versions included matrix operations as language primitives. A public domain interpreter for a mixture of DECs MU-Basic and Microsoft Basic is here ftp://oak. oakland. edu/pub/Unix-c/languages/basic/basic. tar-z A yacc parser and interpreter were in the comp. sources. unix archives volume 2. See also ANSI Minimal BASIC, bournebasic, bwBASIC, ubasic, Visual Basic. [Jargon File]

Related Words

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