| | Basic Programming Language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19) |
 | | BASIC's name, coined in classic, computer science tradition to produce a nice acronym, stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,¹ tied to the name of an unpublished paper by the language's co-inventor, Thomas Kurtz (the name thus having no relation to C. Ogden's series "Basic English"). |
 | | Almost immediately after its release, computer professionals started deriding BASIC as too slow and too simple;² such elitism is a recurring theme in the computer industry. |
 | | Modern BASIC dialects have abandoned line numbers, and support most (or all) of the structured control and data declaration constructs known in other languages like C and Pascal (note also that some advanced versions of line number-based home computer BASICs incorporated such constructs as these to good effect): |
| www.wikiverse.org /basic-programming-language (2986 words) |