BASIC was designed to be learned in an afternoon. Nothing wrong with Pascal, but it's drastically more complex to learn and to implement. The original BASIC use

BASIC was designed to be learned in an afternoon. Nothing wrong with Pascal, but it's drastically more complex to learn and to implement. The original BASIC user manual was just 23 pages long! https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basicmanual_1964.pdf https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basicmanual_1964.pdf The goals on page 1 are particularly relevant: 1) easy to learn, 2) efficient/compiled, 3) stepping stone to more advanced languages (s/Algol/Pascal/), and 4) general purpose. This simplicity paid off for early microcomputers and microcontrollers which could fit a BASIC interpreter, hardware drivers, and a user program into a few kilobytes of memory, creating a system that could run any of the programs in the above Dartmouth BASIC manual.