> Basic was pretty clearly designed as an interactive, student dialect of Fortran Exactly. The primary variations in that program from an equivalent BASIC prog

> Basic was pretty clearly designed as an interactive, student dialect of Fortran Exactly. The primary variations in that program from an equivalent BASIC program are the more cryptic output commands (FORMAT/WRITE vs. PRINT) and the comments (C vs. REM). (Note that PRINT did originally mean "print on paper" using a teletype-style printing terminal.) I recall reading that Tom Kurtz (BASIC's co-creator) would travel by train to some other campus to batch-process his FORTRAN punched card decks - and many programs failed because of simple errors.