True BASIC

True BASIC is a structured dialect of the BASIC programming language, created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, the Dartmouth College professors who had devised the original Dartmouth BASIC. It grew out of Structured BASIC, an offshoot of Dartmouth BASIC released in 1975 or 1976, and out of the American national effort to standardize BASIC, whose Minimal BASIC and Full BASIC standards saw little adoption once Microsoft BASIC became the de facto standard on home computers. Kemeny and Kurtz kept pursuing those ideas, and True BASIC was introduced in 1985, initially based on Dartmouth BASIC 7. As a structured language it needs neither line numbers nor GOTO statements, although both can still be used. It keeps the matrix arithmetic of early Dartmouth BASIC and adds global and local variables, which make recursive functions and subroutines possible. It was meant to be hardware independent, so the same source would run on any version of its compiler, and compilers existed for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and classic Mac OS. Wikipedia reports that the product website was officially closed as of February 2026.