BASIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE 1 - ORIGIN, MEANING, BASIC CHARACTERS, BASIC STATEMENT, AND BASIC ARITHMETIC OPERATORS (SS1 NOTE)

 BASIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE 1

ORIGIN, MEANING, BASIC CHARACTERS, BASIC STATEMENT, AND BASIC ARITHMETIC OPERATORS

Objective: At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:

1. Define BASIC programming language.

2. List the BASIC characters, statements, and arithmetic operators

ORIGIN AND MEANING OF BASIC

BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was developed in 1960 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz to teach students at Dartmouth College. It has undergone a series of historical development, which has resulted in several forms of the language.
BASIC is now in form of VB.NET (Visual Basic.Net). The majority of BASIC languages use program translators called interpreters to allow the computer to understand and obey the BASIC statements in the computer program. Examples of such interpreters are:
(i) BASICA
(ii) GwBASIC
(iii) Turbo BASIC
(iv) Quick BASIC

(v) BASIC 256

BASIC CHARACTERS

There are three types of characters used in BASIC. These are: 

(1) alphabetic - (A - Z)

(2) numeric/Digits (0-9)

(3) special characters: *, /,^, ( ), &, %, 

OTHER SPECIAL CHARACTERS: Some special characters are com-bined to form other elements in BASIC. The following list shows these com-binations:

> = greater than or equal

< = less than or equal

<> not equal

** exponent

BASIC STATEMENTS

The common statement in BASIC are:;

1. CLS (CLEARSCREEN) : This can be used to avoid getting unexpected display on the screen.

2. REM (REMARK) : Any BASIC statement begins with REM. This is used to make program more readable.

3. LET : This is used to assign a value to a variable.

4. READ : to copy data to a place where it can be used by a program

5. INPUT : This allows numeric values to be entered.

6. OUTPUT: This is the information on the screen after running the program.

7. PRINT: This is an output statement that allows the content of the data to display on the screen.

8. END: This indicates the end of a BASIC program and it is compulsory otherwise the program will have no end.

BASIC ARITHMETIC OPERATOR

The common arithmetic operators in BASIC are

(i) + (addition), 

(ii) - (subtraction)

(iii) * (multiplication), 

(iv) / (division)

(v) ^/** (exponential)

BASIC programming language must follow the above order of execution of the program for it  to run/work.

Class Activities

1. BASIC stands for _______________________

2. List and explain any three (3) BASIC characters and statements.