From WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) [wn]:
basic
adj 1: pertaining to or constituting a base or basis; "a basic
fact"; "the basic ingredients"; "basic changes in
public opinion occur because of changes in priorities"
[ant: incidental]
2: reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible
without loss of generality; "a basic story line"; "a
canonical syllable pattern" [syn: canonic, canonical]
3: of primary importance; "basic truths" [syn: basal,
primary]
4: serving as a base or starting point; "a basic course in
Russian"; "basic training for raw recruits"; "a set of
basic tools"; "an introductory art course" [syn:
introductory]
5: of or denoting or of the nature of or containing a base
n 1: a popular programming language that is relatively easy to
learn; an acronym for beginner's all-purpose symbolic
instruction code; no longer in general use [syn:
BASIC]
2: (usually plural) a necessary commodity for which demand is
constant [syn: staple]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Basic \Ba"sic\, a.
1. (Chem.)
(a) Relating to a base; performing the office of a base in
a salt.
(b) Having the base in excess, or the amount of the base
atomically greater than that of the acid, or exceeding
in proportion that of the related neutral salt.
(c) Apparently alkaline, as certain normal salts which
exhibit alkaline reactions with test paper.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Min.) Said of crystalline rocks which contain a
relatively low percentage of silica, as basalt.
[1913 Webster]
Basic salt (Chem.), a salt formed from a base or hydroxide
by the partial replacement of its hydrogen by a negative
or acid element or radical.
[1913 Webster]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
BASIC \BASIC\ n.
1. (Computers) [Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Iruction C.]
an artificial computer language with a relatively
simplified instruction set.
Note: Writing a program in BASIC or other higher computer
languages is simpler than writing in assembly language.
See also programming language, FORTRAN.
[PJC]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
higher programming language \higher programming language\ n.
(Computers)
A computer programming language with an instruction set
allowing one instruction to code for several assembly
language instructions.
Note: The aggregation of several assembly-language
instructions into one instruction allows much greater
efficiency in writing computer programs. Most programs
are now written in some higher programming language,
such as BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, C, C++,
PROLOG, or JAVA.
[PJC]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 Sep 2003) [foldoc]:
BASIC
<language> Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
A simple language oroginally designed for ease of programming
by students and beginners.
BASIC exists in many dialects, and 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 (a) 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. 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
(ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/Unix-c/languages/basic/basic.tar-z)}.
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)
From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]:
BASIC
/bay'.sic/, n.
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]
BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".
Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later backronym
were incorrect.