Episode 19: BASIC

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News

• The voices of China’s Workers
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc2wVyl8RLI&feature=plcp 
• Raspberry Pi Supercomputer
• http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/pi_supercomputer_southampton.htm
• Common Crawl
• http://commoncrawl.org/ 
• Turing Complete Magic the Gathering Cards
• http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html
• Nintendo Wii U coming out
• http://www.pcworld.com/article/262282/nintendo_wii_u_to_launch_in_us_europe_starting_in_november_will_work_as_dvr.html 

Tool of the Biweek

• Jason:  Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ 
• Patrick: Wireshark http://www.wireshark.org/

BASIC

History

• Created in Dartmouth
• Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC)
• Commodore 64, TRS-80, Apple II booted into an immediate mode basic interpreter
• First Generation (Line numbering required)
• Second Generation (Quick Basic, Power Basic)
• No line numbers
• Procedures
• Third generation (OO)
• Visual Basic
• VBScript (ASP, VBA)
• VB .NET (compiles to IDL)

Features

• Explicit program counters
• QBASIC added implicit PCs

Strengths

• Quick to start coding
• Approachable syntax

Weaknesses

• Slow
• Not Object Oriented

Tools

• Many free versions of basic interpreters

Uses

• Learning how to program
• Programming TI Calculators