Turbo Basic

c H A p T E R 1About BASICLike Maine lobster, maple syrup, and basketball, BASIC is a product of NewEngland. Created in 1964 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, as alanguage for teaching programming, BASIC is commonly identified as an acronymfor "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." (However, cynics thinkinventors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz first came up with a catchy name fortheir new, easy-to-use language and then worked backward to concoct something itcould stand for.)Students and programmers alike soon found that BASIC could do practicallyanything that stuffy, awkward FORTRAN could do. And since BASIC was so easyto learn and to work, its programs usually ended up taking less time to write thanits FORTRAN equivalents. BASIC was also available on most personal computers,usually in ROM. So BASIC caught on in a big way.Remarkably, of the dozens of general-purpose programming languages availableto programming aficionados, BASIC is still the easiest to learn more than 20 yearsafter its introduction. And better yet, BASIC gets the job done. C and Pascal snobsnotwithstanding, BASIC is a no-nonsense language gifted with powerful tools fortackling the specific things that people do most with small computers, namely,working with files and putting text and graphics on a display.Although their language has its detractors, no one can deny that Kemeny andKurtz achieved their "BASIC" goal: to make programming more accessible to morepeople. This leads us to Turbo Basic.5