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Definition of BASIC

By David Bolton, About.com

Definition: BASIC is an acronym of Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and was invented at Dartford College in the early 1960s by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz.

It was interpreted, easy to use and introduced thousands to programming long before personal computers existed. A famous Computer Scientist once said that anyone who learnt BASIC was brain damaged.

Modern versions of BASIC such as Visual Basic avoid many of the problems of original BASIC such as line numbers.

Glossary:

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