True BASIC
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| Designed by | Kemeny, Kurtz at Dartmouth College |
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| Developer | True BASIC Inc. |
| First appeared | 1983 |
| Website | www |
| Influenced by | |
| BASIC | |
True BASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language descended from Dartmouth BASIC — the original BASIC — invented by college professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz.
When True BASIC appeared on the market in 1985, the BASIC language was widely used on home computers, but with little standardization. Each manufacturer implemented extensions to the language to support features of their hardware. Initially based on Dartmouth BASIC 7 — otherwise known as ANSI BASIC — True BASIC implemented a number of new features over GW-BASIC, and allowed the user a redefinable 16-color, 640×480 pixel backdrop for program editing. True BASIC introduced new functions for graphics primitives like plot, plot area, flood, etc. It also was the first to provide a method for saving a portion of the screen and blitting it elsewhere, but had no proper buffering implementation.
Being a structured programming implementation of the language, it dispensed with the need for line numbers and GOTO statements, although these earlier features can still be used. Use of LET for value assignment became optional. It also allowed for descriptive variable names longer than a single letter plus a single digit. For example, the familiar algebraic equation y = mx + b (y = mx + c for the UK) could be expressed as:
The above code segment would yield "y2= 10".
True BASIC provides statements for matrix arithmetic, a feature that had been present in Dartmouth BASIC since early times, but had been dropped in almost all microcomputer versions of BASIC interpreters due to memory limitations. It also supports global and local variables, which permits recursive functions and subroutines to be written.
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