Hello, BASIC

BASIC — Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — was created at Dartmouth College in 1964 with a radical goal: computing for everyone, not just scientists with punch cards. It worked. By the early 1980s virtually every home computer booted straight into a BASIC prompt, and a generation learned to program on it. This course uses FreeBASIC (the fbc compiler): a free, modern compiler that keeps the classic QuickBASIC syntax but produces fast native executables. Your code here is genuinely compiled and run — same as C, just friendlier.

Your first program

PRINT "Hello, BASIC!"

That one line is a complete program. No class, no main function, no imports. This is BASIC's founding idea: the language should meet the beginner, not the other way around. Execution starts at the top of the file and runs downward, line by line.

Ground rules before anything else:

• Keywords are case-insensitive. PRINT, print, and Print are the same word. (Convention here: keywords in CAPS, like the classics.)
• Text inside quotes is NOT case-insensitive. "Hello" and "hello" are different strings — and the grader cares.
• One statement per line. No semicolon terminators like C or Java.
• Comments start with ' (a single quote) or the old-school REM. The compiler ignores the rest of the line.

How PRINT separates things

PRINT writes its arguments, then moves to a new line. The separator between arguments controls spacing:

PRINT "one"; "two"       ' onetwo   (semicolon joins with NO space)
PRINT "one", "two"       ' comma jumps to the next 14-column zone
PRINT "no newline yet";
PRINT " ...same line"    ' a trailing ; suppresses the newline

The comma zones exist for quick table layouts on 1980s screens. For exact output — which is what graders check — prefer ; and put any spaces you need inside the quotes yourself.

The trap: unquoted text

PRINT Hello, BASIC!      ' COMPILE ERROR

Without quotes, the compiler reads Hello as a variable name. FreeBASIC's default dialect requires variables to be declared before use, so this stops with a "variable not declared" error. Museum-era BASICs were worse: they silently invented the variable and printed 0. The modern dialect turns that silent bug into a loud one — that's a feature.

A peek at input

DIM n AS INTEGER
INPUT "", n
PRINT n * 2

INPUT reads a value typed into the program. The empty "" prompt matters: plain INPUT n prints a ? prompt first, and on this platform that stray ? becomes part of your output and fails the exact-match grader. DIM is variable declaration — the entire next lesson is about it.

Your exercise

Print exactly:

Hello, BASIC!

Replace the ' PRINT "..." comment in the starter with a real PRINT. The grader compares your output character by character, and these are the mistakes it catches every day:

• Hello Basic! — BASIC must be ALL CAPS, and the comma after Hello is required.
• Missing the ! at the end.
• Adding a second PRINT "for good measure" — that emits an extra blank line and the match fails. One PRINT already ends with a newline, which is exactly what the grader expects.