BASIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE 1 - ORIGIN, MEANING, BASIC CHARACTERS, BASIC STATEMENT, AND BASIC ARITHMETIC OPERATORS (JS2 NOTES)

 

    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. State what BASIC stands for

3.  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).Examples of interpreters in BASIC 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.