BASIC
<language> Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. A simple
language originally designed for ease of programming by students and beginners.
Many dialects exist, and BASIC is popular on microcomputers with sound and
graphics support. Most micro versions are interactive and interpreted.
BASIC has become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. 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 is painful and encourages bad habits that will make it
harder to use more powerful languages. This wouldn't be so bad if historical
accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins
thousands of potential wizards a year.
Originally, all references to code, both GOTO and GOSUB (subroutine call)
referred to the destination by its line number. This allowed for very simple
editing in the days before text editors were considered essential. Just typing
the line number deleted the line and to edit a line you just typed the new line
with the same number. Programs were typically numbered in steps of ten to allow
for insertions. Later versions, such as BASIC V, allow GOTO-less structured
programming with named procedures and functions, IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF constructs
and WHILE loops etc.
Early BASICs had no graphic operations except with graphic characters. In the
1970s BASIC interpreters became standard features in mainframes and
minicomputers. Some versions included matrix operations as language primitives.
A public domain interpreter for a mixture of DEC's MU-Basic and Microsoft Basic
is here. A yacc parser and interpreter were in the comp.sources.unix
archives volume 2.
See also ANSI Minimal BASIC, bournebasic, bwBASIC, ubasic, Visual Basic.
[Jargon File]
(1995-03-15)
Nearby terms:
basename « Base Technology « bash « BASIC »
Basic Assembly Language » BASIC AUTOCODER » Basic
COBOL
Basic Assembly Language
(BAL) What most people called IBM 360 assembly language.
See ALC.
(1995-04-13)
Nearby terms:
Base Technology « bash « BASIC « Basic Assembly
Language
» BASIC AUTOCODER » Basic COBOL » Basic Encoding
Rules
BASIC AUTOCODER
Early system on IBM 7070. Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959).
Nearby terms:
bash « BASIC « Basic Assembly Language « BASIC
AUTOCODER
» Basic COBOL » Basic Encoding Rules » Basic Fortran
Basic COBOL
<language> A subset of COBOL from COBOL-60 standards.
[Sammet 1969, p. 339].
(1997-12-07)
Nearby terms:
BASIC « Basic Assembly Language « BASIC AUTOCODER «
Basic COBOL » Basic Encoding Rules » Basic
Fortran » Basic Input/Output System
Basic Encoding Rules
<protocol, standard> (BER) ASN.1 encoding rules for producing
self-identifying and self-delimiting transfer syntax for data structures
described in ASN.1 notations.
BER is an self-identifying and self-delimiting encoding scheme, which means that
each data value can be identified, extracted and decoded individually.
Huw Rogers once described BER as "a triumph of bloated theory over clean
implementation". He also criticises it as designed around bitstreams with
arbitrary boundaries between data which can only be determined at a high level.
Documents: ITU-T X.690, ISO 8825-1.
See also CER, DER, PER.
(1998-05-28)
Nearby terms:
Basic Assembly Language « BASIC AUTOCODER « Basic
COBOL «
Basic Encoding Rules » Basic Fortran » Basic
Input/Output System » Basic JOVIAL
Basic Fortran
<language> A subset of Fortran.
[Sammet 1969, p. 150].
(1999-06-09)
Nearby terms:
BASIC AUTOCODER « Basic COBOL « Basic Encoding Rules
«
Basic Fortran » Basic Input/Output System »
Basic JOVIAL » Basic Language for Implementation of
System Software
Basic Input/Output System
<operating system> (BIOS, ROM BIOS) The part of the system software of
the IBM PC and compatibles that provides the lowest level interface to
peripheral devices and controls the first stage of the bootstrap process,
including installing the operating system. The BIOS is stored in ROM, or
equivalent, in every PC. Its main task is to load and execute the operating
system which is usually stored on the computer's hard disk, but may be loaded
from CD-ROM or floppy disk at install time.
In order to provide acceptable performance (e.g. for screen display), some
software vendors access the routines in the BIOS directly, rather than using the
higher level operating system calls. Thus, the BIOS in the compatible computer
must be 100% compatible with the IBM BIOS.
As if that wasn't bad enough, many application programs bypass even the BIOS and
address the screen hardware directly just as the BIOS does. Consequently,
register level compatibility is required in the compatible's display
electronics, which means that it must provide the same storage locations and
identification as the original IBM hardware.
(1999-06-09)
Nearby terms:
Basic COBOL « Basic Encoding Rules « Basic Fortran «
Basic Input/Output System » Basic JOVIAL » Basic
Language for Implementation of System Software »
Basic Multilingual Plane
Basic JOVIAL
<language> A subset of JOVIAL written ca. 1965.
[Sammet 1969, p.529].
(1995-04-19)
Nearby terms:
Basic Encoding Rules « Basic Fortran « Basic
Input/Output System « Basic JOVIAL » Basic
Language for Implementation of System Software »
Basic Multilingual Plane » Basic Object Adapter
Basic Language for Implementation of System Software
<language> (BLISS, or allegedly, "System Software Implementation
Language, Backwards") A language designed by W.A. Wulf at CMU around 1969.
BLISS is an expression language. It is block-structured, and typeless, with
exception handling facilities, coroutines, a macro system, and a highly
optimising compiler. It was one of the first non-assembly languages for
operating system implementation. It gained fame for its lack of a goto and also
lacks implicit dereferencing: all symbols stand for addresses, not values.
Another characteristic (and possible explanation for the backward acronym) was
that BLISS fairly uniformly used backward keywords for closing blocks, a famous
example being ELUDOM to close a MODULE. An exception was BEGIN...END though you
could use (...) instead.
DEC introduced the NOVALUE keyword in their dialects to allow statements to not
return a value.
Versions: CMU BLISS-10 for the PDP-10; CMU BLISS-11, BLISS-16, DEC BLISS-16C,
DEC BLISS-32, BLISS-36 for VAX/VMS, BLISS-36C.
["BLISS: A Language for Systems Programming", CACM 14(12):780-790, Dec 1971].
[Did the B stand for "Better"?]
(1997-03-01)
Nearby terms:
Basic Fortran « Basic Input/Output System « Basic
JOVIAL «
Basic Language for Implementation of System Software
» Basic Multilingual Plane » Basic Object Adapter »
Basic Object System
Basic Multilingual Plane
<text, standard> (BMP) The first plane defined in Unicode/ISO 10646,
designed to include all scripts in active modern use. The BMP currently includes
the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Devangari, hiragana, katakana, and Cherokee scripts,
among others, and a large body of mathematical, APL-related, and other
miscellaneous characters. Most of the Han ideographs in current use are present
in the BMP, but due to the large number of ideographs, many were placed in the
Supplementary Ideographic Plane.
Unicode home.
(2002-03-19)
Nearby terms:
Basic Input/Output System « Basic JOVIAL « Basic
Language for Implementation of System Software «
Basic Multilingual Plane » Basic Object Adapter
» Basic Object System » Basic Operating System
Basic Object Adapter
<architecture> (BOA) Part of the CORBA architecture.
[Details?]
(2004-06-23)
Nearby terms:
Basic JOVIAL « Basic Language for Implementation of
System Software « Basic Multilingual Plane «
Basic Object Adapter » Basic Object System »
Basic Operating System » Basic Programming Support
Basic Object System
<programming> (BOS) A C-callable library that implements the notion of
object and which uses Tcl as its interpreter for interpreted methods (you can
have "compiled" methods in C, and mix compiled and interpreted methods in the
same object, plus lots more). You can subclass and mix in existing objects using
BOS to extend, among other things, the set of tk widgets. BOS is a class-free
object system, also called a prototype-based object system; it is modelled
loosely on the Self system from Stanford University.
Version 1.31 by Sean Levy <Sean.Levy@cs.cmu.edu>.
ftp://barkley.berkeley.edu/tcl.
(1992-08-21)
Nearby terms:
Basic Language for Implementation of System Software
« Basic Multilingual Plane « Basic Object Adapter «
Basic Object System » Basic Operating System »
Basic Programming Support » Basic Rate Interface
Basic Operating System
<operating system> (BOS) An early [when?] IBM operating system.
According to folklore, BOS was the predecessor to TOS on the IBM 360 and it was
IPL'd from a card reader. It may have been intended for very small 360's with no
disks and limited tape drives.
BOS died out really early [when?] as disks such as the 2311 and 2314 became
common with the IBM 360, whereas disks had been a real luxury on the IBM 7090.
(1999-01-29)
Nearby terms:
Basic Multilingual Plane « Basic Object Adapter «
Basic Object System « Basic Operating System
» Basic Programming Support » Basic Rate Interface »
BASIC V
Basic Programming Support
<operating system> (BPS, colloquially: Barely Programming Support) A
suite of utility routines from IBM to perform very simple procedures like
formatting a disk or labelling a tape. BPS was only available on punched cards.
[Dates?]
(1998-07-08)
Nearby terms:
Basic Object Adapter « Basic Object System « Basic
Operating System « Basic Programming Support
» Basic Rate Interface » BASIC V » Bastard Operator
From Hell
Basic Rate Interface
<communications> (BRI, 2B+D, 2B1D) An Integrated Services Digital Network
channel consisting of two 64 kbps "bearer" (B) channels and one 16 kbps "delta"
(D) channel, giving a total data rate of 144 kbps. The B channels are used for
voice or user data, and the D channel is used for control and signalling and/or
X.25 packet networking. BRI is the kind of ISDN interface most likely to be
found in residential service.
(2002-01-13)
Nearby terms:
Basic Object System « Basic Operating System « Basic
Programming Support « Basic Rate Interface »
BASIC V » Bastard Operator From Hell » bastion host
BASIC V
The version of the Basic programming language which comes on ROM in Acorn's RISC
computers: the Archimedes range and the RiscPC. It features REPEAT and WHILE
loops, multi-line IF statements, procedures and functions, local variables,
error handling, system calls and a built-in assembler.
(1995-01-05)
Nearby terms:
Basic Operating System « Basic Programming Support «
Basic Rate Interface « BASIC V » Bastard
Operator From Hell » bastion host » batch file
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