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BASIC,
an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, is a family of high-level programming languages, initially designed in 1963/1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ¹ .

While early dialects worked in conjunction with a teletype command line interpreter, which could immediately interprete and print expressions, or run a program which lines were entered (or re-loaded from punch tape) with leading line numbers, later dialects were more sophisticated with respect to program structure, recursion, object-oriented and event-driven programming paradigms, and compiled executables.

Basic Engines

There were a few didactic chess programs written in Basic, most notably a program by Dieter Steinwender published 1984 in Computerschach und Spiele ² , Demoschach by Hans-Joachim Kraas and Günther Schrüfer ³ , and Minimax by Chrilly Donninger and Dieter Steinwender ⁴, which was later converted to WinBoard by Thomas McBurney ⁵.

• Engines written in Basic

Dialects

GFA BASIC

GFA BASIC is a BASIC variant originally developed for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST and then later ported to Microsoft Windows. It looks a bit like Pascal.

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a event-driven programming language with integrated development environment by from Microsoft for its Component Object Model (COM) programming model, first released in 1991.

Publications

• Michael McCann (1979). Basic Chess. Personal Computing, Vol. 3, No. 12, pp. 48
• Craig A. Finseth (1980). Something is Missing (Implementing recursion and stacks in BASIC). The Best of Creative Computing Volume 3 » Recursion, Stack
• Rainer Bartel, Hans-Joachim Kraas, Günther Schrüfer (1985). Das große Computerschachbuch. Data Becker (German) from amazon.de ⁶

Forum Posts

• Chess in BASIC? by William H. Rogers, CCC, August 28, 1998 » Point Value
• qBASIC Chess program - from 1984 by Dieter Steinwender by Mike Byrne, CCC, February 23, 2003

Re: Another qBASIC Chess program -Dieter Steinwender (in english+comment by Tony Worsman, CCC, February 24, 2003

• Old chess program in BASIC (long post) by Walter Faxon, CCC, March 20, 2005
• GUI in Visual Basic by Edmund Moshammer, CCC, February 28, 2009 » GUI
• Call an engine from BASIC?! by Jens Bæk Nielsen, CCC, May 24, 2020

Re: Call an engine from BASIC?! by Tony Mokonen, CCC, May 27, 2020

External Links

Wikipedia

• BASIC
• List of BASIC dialects
• Altair BASIC
• Applesoft BASIC
• Atom Basic » Acorn Atom
• Basic4ppc
• BBC BASIC » BBC Micro ⁷
• Commodore BASIC
• Dartmouth BASIC
• FreeBASIC
• FutureBASIC
• GFA BASIC
• GLBasic
• GW-BASIC
• HP BASIC

HP time-shared BASIC

• Locomotive BASIC
• Microsoft BASIC
• NS Basic
• PowerBASIC
• PureBasic
• QBasic
• QuickBASIC
• Sinclair BASIC
• Tiny BASIC
• Turbo Basic
• Visual Basic

VBScript

Visual Basic .NET

Visual Basic for Applications

HIARCS

• HIARCS 3 (0.3) Source code, 1981 from HIARCS: Where It All Began by Mark Uniacke ⁸
• HIARCS 5 (0.5) Source code, 1983 from Now Walking by Mark Uniacke

References