BASIC

Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Developed by John Kemeney and Thomas Kurtz in the mid 1960s at Dartmouth College, BASIC is one of the earliest and simplesthigh-level programming languages. During the 1970s, it was the principal programming language taught to students, and continues to be a popular choice among educators.

Despite its simplicity, BASIC is used for a wide variety of businessapplications. There is an ANSI standard for the BASIC language, but most versions of BASIC include many proprietary extensions.Microsoft's popular Visual Basic, for example, adds many object-oriented featuresto the standard BASIC.

Recently, many variations of BASIC have appeared as programming, or macro, languages within applications. For example, Microsoft Word and Excel both come with a version of BASIC with which userscan write programs to customize and automate these applications.