BASIC Implementations

A subset of FORTRAN originally developed by John G. Kemény and Thomas E. Kurtz in 1964 to offer an easier programming language for beginners for the Dartmouth University timesharing system. Basic was easy to implement and could reside in a fairly small amount of memory which made it popular with the first generation of microcomputers in the 1970's and it remained the most popular programming language on personal computers until the 1990's.

Like the FORTRAN language it is based on Basic is unstructured and therefore there is a tendency for programmers to write spaghetti code when developing in Basic, and with the variants used in microcomputers, known collectively as "Street Basic", the tendency was even greater. Awareness of this shortcoming increased in the early 80's as Basic started to come under threat in educational institutions on one hand from languages designed from ground up to teach structured programming like COMAL and on the other hand from inexpensive implementations of Pascal. Many Basic developers responded by making their variations of the language increasingly structured to a point where some of them resemble Pascal in all aspects except syntax.

In 1990 more people knew how to program in Basic than in all other programming languages combined, however the language started to loose its popularity when GUI's became more popular but most Basic implementation had limited support for the programming models needed.

A list of OS/2 implementations of Basic

• Bywater Basic - Current - Command line only.
• CA Realizer - Discontinued. Versions 1 & 2 offered OS/2 support
• GFA Basic - Discontinued
• IBM VisualAge for Basic - Discontinued
• Liberty BASIC - Discontinued
• Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued
• Omni Basic - Discontinued
• True Basic - No longer developed but available for sale at a discounted price. Versions up to 5.5 supported OS/2

A list of DOS implementations of Basic

• BBC Basic - Discontinued but supplied for free with the Windows version of the product.
• Bywater Basic - Current.
• Canon Basic - Discontinued - A scripting variant of this language is still used for embedded programming by Canon.
• CBasic - Discontinued - First Symantec product - Distributed by DRI
• GFA Basic - Discontinued - Free Download
• Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued. Version 1 offered DOS support.
• MWBasic - Aka MB86 - Discontinued
• Napoleon Brandy Basic - Current - Open Source
• Omni Basic - Discontinued
• QBasic - Comes included with the DOS subsystem all versions of eComStation and in OS/2 versions 2.0 and higher.
• QuickBasic - Discontinued
• True Basic - Discontinued. Versions up to 4.01 supported DOS.

A list of Basic implementations that run under Win-OS/2

• CA Realizer - Discontinued. Versions 1 to 3 offer WinOS/2 support.
• GFA Basic - Discontinued - Free Download - Limited support available from a third party.
• Liberty BASIC - Discontinued - Last version that works under WinOS/2 is 2.02
• Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued. Versions 1 to 4 offer WinOS/2 support.
• True Basic - Discontinued. Versions up to 5.3 supported WinOS/2

A list of Basic language implementations in Java

• Cocoa
• HotTEA - Discontinued
• Instant Basic for Java - Discontinued
• Jasic

A list of Basic language implementations in JavaScript

• qb.js - Partially QBasic compatible, can be run inside a web browser or by using the JavaScript Desktop Enabler.

Links

USENET

• comp.lang.basic.misc - Still alive (mostly) - Go to the Google groups version if you are newsgroup challenged.

Standards

• ECMA-55 MINIMAL Basic Standard in PDF format - Now withdrawn by ECMA but used as a reference in some modern "Street Basic" implementations

Also known as ISO 6373 or ISO 6373:1984 Data processing -- Programming languages -- Minimal BASIC. - The standard originated at ECMA but copies of it are still valid standards in some countries for instance as ANSI X3.60-1978 minimal BASIC in the USA, as Australian Standard AS 2797-1985 Programming language - Minimal BASIC

• ECMA-116 ECMA Basic-1, ECMA Basic-2 and ECMA Graphics Module Standards in PDF format - Now withdrawn but used as a reference for a number of modern Basic implementations.

Like the earlier standard this originated at EMCA and while they have withdrawn it a number of international and local standard organisations still have it as current standard including ANSI X3.113-1987 "Programming Languages Full BASIC" in the USA and the interntaional INCITS/ISO/IEC 10279-1991 (R2005) "Information Technology - Programming Languages - Full BASIC".

• ANSI X3.113 Interpretations-1992 "BASIC Technical Information Bulletin # 1 Interpretations of ANSI 03.113-1987"

USA only addendum to the ECMA-116 standard.

• ISO/IEC 10279:1991/ Amd 1:1994 "Modules and Single Character Input Enhancement"

Small addendum to the original ECMA-116/ISO10279 standard, no downloadable version available.