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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

It is supposed to be "BASIC", from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code no less [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

I knew that it used to stand for that (and as an acronym should be upper-case), but I thought they maybe dropped that somewhere along the way.

Fortran and Cobol used to be "FORTRAN" and "COBOL", too, but once systems with support for upper- and lowercase-letters became widespread, they went mixed-case.

I recall there was some debate if the name BASIC had been intended as an acronym initially, but in time, evidence (AFAIR, anyway) tended to support the claim is was an acronym from the very beginning. (-:

Dartmouth celebrated the 50th anniversary of BASIC a few years ago and they were pretty consistent in keeping it all upper case.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html

True BASIC, a company that Kemeny and Kurtz founded in 1983, is all upper case too.

https://www.truebasic.com/about

Well, Happy Birthday BASIC!

Love it or hate it, BASIC has left a footprint in the IT world that few languages could match.

> Fortran and Cobol used to be "FORTRAN" and "COBOL", too, but once systems with support for upper- and lowercase-letters became widespread, they went mixed-case

COBOL is still “COBOL” (at least per the IBM page on the language and the ISO/IEC 1989:2014 standard for the language.

My bad then. Thank you for pointing that out.

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