Basic programming language: The word basic stands for "Beginner's All-purpose

Symbolic Instruction Code." BASIC is a computer programming language that was

developed in the mid-1960s to provide a way for students to write simple computer
programs. Since then, the language has evolved into a more robust and powerful
language and can be used to create advanced programs for today's computer
systems.

BASIC originally used numbers at the beginning of each instruction (or line) to tell
the computer what order to process the instructions. Lines would be numbered as
10, 20, 30, etc., which would allow additional instructions to be placed between
commands later on if needed. "GOTO" statements enabled programs to loop back
to earlier instructions during execution. For example, line 230 of a BASIC program
may have an "if" clause that tells the computer to jump back to line 50 if a variable
is less than 10. This instruction might look something like this:

230 IF (N < 10) THEN GOTO 50

More modern BASIC implementations use "while loops," which perform a series
of instructions as long as a certain case is true. Newer BASIC development
software also supports more data types, such as integers, strings, and arrays, for
storing variables and other data. While the first BASIC development environments
were strictly text-based, today's BASIC programming software allows developers
to design much of their programs visually, using a graphical user interface. Some
of the more popular BASIC development programs used today include REAL
basic and Microsoft Visual Basic.

Fortran programming language: The FORTRAN programming language was

conceived in the early 1950s the name produced from the two words formula
translation. In 1966 the language was standardized and FORTRAN IV was born.
Revision of the language led to FORTRAN 77, the language we use today. The
standard for FORTRAN 90 is now available although not yet in widespread use.
F77 is a subset of F90.

FORTRAN was designed for scientists and engineers, and has dominated this field.
For the past 30 years FORTRAN has been used for such projects as the design of
bridges and aeroplane structures, it is used for factory automation control, for
storm drainage design, analysis of scientific data and so on.
Throughout the life of this language, groups of users have written libraries of
useful standard FORTRAN programs.
These programs can be borrowed and used by other people who wish to take
advantage of the expertise and experience of the authors, in a similar way in which
a book is borrowed from a library.

The individual user may wish to build up their own library of routines they often
use.