Editing Dartmouth BASIC (section)

===Earlier work===
[[John G. Kemeny]] joined the mathematics department of Dartmouth College in 1953 and later became its department chairman. In 1956 he gained access to an [[IBM 704]] via [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT's]] [[NERCOMP|New England Regional Computer Center]] efforts. That year, he wrote the [[DARSIMCO]] language, a version of [[assembly language|assembler]] which simplified the programming of mathematical operations. He was aided by [[Thomas E. Kurtz]], who joined the department that year.{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|p=516}}

DARSIMCO was forgotten when the first [[Fortran|FORTRAN]] compiler was installed on the machine in 1957. The arrival of FORTRAN instilled an important lesson. Kurtz, having been indoctrinated that FORTRAN was slow, spent several months writing a program in 704 assembler which had taken up about an hour of CPU time to debug and still was not running. Giving up, he rewrote it in FORTRAN and had it running in five minutes. The lesson was that high-level languages could save time, regardless of their measured performance.{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|p=516}}

In 1959, the school received its first computer, the [[drum memory|drum-based]] [[LGP-30]]. One student wrote a FORTRAN-inspired language called DART for the machine. This led to an effort to produce an ALGOL 58 compiler, turning to [[ALGOL 60]] when that definition was finalized. Writing the compiler was difficult due to the very small memory size, 32&nbsp;KB in modern terms, and was extremely slow, based on the drum speed of 3600&nbsp;rpm. Nevertheless, they were able to produce a functional cut-down version known as [[Dartmouth ALGOL 30|ALGOL 30]].{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|pp=516-516}} Further development produced SCALP, the "Self-Contained Algol Processor", a one-pass compiler that was ready to run the compiled program as soon as the [[punched tape]] finished reading in the source. Output with the program results or any error messages would immediately appear. This [[compile-and-go]] style of operation would later be used by BASIC.{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|pp=516-516}}{{sfn|Kemeny|Kurtz|1985|p=7}}

In 1962, Kemeny and high-school student Sidney Marshall{{sfn|Kemeny|Kurtz|1985|p=8}} began experimenting with a new language, [[DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment)]]. This used numbered lines to represent instructions, for instance, to add two numbers, DOPE used:

  5 + A B C

Which meant "on line 5, perform an addition of the values in variables A and B and put the result in C". Although somewhat cryptic in layout, the basis for the future BASIC language can be seen.{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|p=517}} In addition to basic mathematical operations, the language included SQR, EXP, LOG, SIN and a simple branching construct.{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|p=518}}