Text 9169, 41 rader
Skriven 2000-01-22 11:57:38 av Roger Eriksson (2:205/412.10)
   Kommentar till text 9156 av Per Lundberg (2:206/145.2000)
Ärende: Re: ASP                                        
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 PL> Vet du vad B i Basic står för?

(The new hackers dictonary)

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]

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.



	-  Roger Eriksson - eMail: dvlren@cs.umu.se - http: www.cs.umu.se/~dvlren  -

--- Spot 1.3b #314
 * Origin:  (2:205/412.10)