A programming language,
originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system
in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of
brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in
"Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration." 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 (a) is very painful, and (b)
encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful
languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents
hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it
is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any
more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control
structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code, but this is a backronym. BASIC was
originally named Basic, simply because it was a simple and basic
programming language. Because most programming language names were
in fact acronyms, BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or
to be silly. No acronym for BASIC originally existed or was
intended (as one can verify by reading texts through the early
1970s). Later, around the mid-1970s, people began to make up
backronyms for BASIC because they weren't sure. Beginner's
All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is the one that caught
on.
Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional
tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily
to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus
extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of
view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including
Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l
summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly
funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
