Microsoft Small Basic

Microsoft Small Basic is a deliberately small programming language, bundled with an interpreter and a simple development environment, that Microsoft offered as a gentle first step into text-based coding. It is a simplified variant of BASIC with only 14 keywords, aimed at students who have already met visual languages such as Scratch and are ready to type code. The environment supplies syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion and documentation shown inside the editor. Microsoft announced it in October 2008 and made a stable release in July 2011, followed by versions 1.1 in March 2015 and 1.2 in October 2015, and a browser version called Small Basic Online in 2019. The language is Turing complete, with conditional branching, loops and subroutines for handling events, and its variables are weakly typed and dynamic. Its standard library includes a Turtle graphics class in the style of Logo, and third-party libraries written for the .NET platform can be added.