output. Now *that* is baroque!" See also {rococo}.

:BASIC: /bay'-sic/ /n./ [acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code] A programming language, originally designed for
Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s,
which has since become the leading cause of brain damage in
proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected
Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is
practically impossible to teach good programming style to students
that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is
another case (like {Pascal}) of the cascading lossage that
happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy
gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs
(on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer
(a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make
it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so
bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end
micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a
year.

[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any
more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control
structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]

:batch: /adj./ 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat
more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in
particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare
it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to
as `batch mode' switches. A `batch file' is a series of