BASIC

From Maze

Topics

• History of BASIC
  • Place within the history of high-level programming languages
  • Dartmouth BASIC
  • BASIC version 2
  • C64 BASIC
  • Discussion of how much variation there was in BASIC dialects on contemporaneous machines
  • The role of BASIC today

• BASIC technical topics introduced through their inclusion in the program of study
  • Line numbers
    • Flow control
      • BASIC not a structured programming language (no blocks, etc.)
      • Many of BASIC's control flow concepts are taken directly from machine language
      • GOTO
        • Dijkstra's arguments against GOTO.
      • FOR NEXT
        • Demonstrate GOTOless version of program
      • GOSUB
      • IF THEN
  • PRINT
    • Originally used for output to print terminals
    • text fields
    • semicolon