BASIC

Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a high-level computer programming language developed in the late 1950s at Dartmouth College in the USA, which has the advantage of being relatively simple to learn and implement. It has since been widely adopted as a standard language by microcomputer manufacturers, though there are now a large number of ‘dialects’ of BASIC for different types of computer which are not readily interchangeable. More recently BASIC has been overtaken by C as a programming language for microcomputers, but Microsoft has developed Visual Basic as a fourth generation language for programming client applications.

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