Minimal BASIC

Minimal BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language developed as an international standard. Work began at ANSI in January 1974, and a parallel group at ECMA joined in September of that year. The final standard, known as ANSI X3.60-1978 and as ECMA-55, was published in December 1977, and the US Bureau of Standards released the NBSIR 77-1420 test suite so that implementations could be checked against it. The standard was essentially the original 1964 Dartmouth BASIC written as a formal specification in Extended Backus-Naur form. It requires a line number on every line, allows numbers from 0 to 9999 for them, ends every program with END, limits variable names to a letter or a letter and a digit, supports only numeric arrays and defines eleven functions. It was never very useful alone, since it had no string manipulation, and by then microcomputer BASICs from Microsoft had become the de facto standard. ISO standardization as ISO 6373:1984 was abandoned in 1998.