• Now as Windows grew up they needed more and more power from basic to do the things that they needed to do to compete with new languages and new paradigms that are coming out on other platforms eventually BASIC gave way to Visual Basic which was still BASIC just with a lot more stuff added to it.

Stanforth BASIC is a version of FORTRAN II, the difference being that it uses an interpreter and it is stored in a serial file, as opposed to on cards. That enabled it to be used on smaller systems with a magnetic tape drive rather than an expensive card reader.

BASIC had the same pupose as Fortran, for use by scientists and engineers to create small routines to solve mathematical problems and sort lists.

VB is nothing like BASIC at all. It is an object orientated language derived from Lisp, a string handling language used for expert systems. The only reason its called BASIC is for marketing purposes.

COBOl is not really a language at all but a script. It was used by very large businesses to do very simple things with a very high degree of repitition - for instance, calculating and printing bills for customers of a gas supply authority.