Here's why you might consider studying either BASIC or C as your first programming language.

Understanding C can be important because so many programming languages (such as Java, C++, C#, and Perl) are based on the C language. So after you know C, you'll have no trouble understanding Java, C++, or practically any other programming language based on C.

With so many people using C (or languages like Java or C++, which are derived from C), any C programmer can find plenty of work, so knowing C is practically a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living as a programmer. Because you'll probably need to know C eventually, you might as well start with C from the beginning.

Ultimately, there's no "perfect" programming language to know and use because every programming language is designed to solve one problem extremely well (and hopefully prove useful enough to solve other problems, too). BASIC was designed to be easy to understand. C was designed to create efficient and powerful programs.

BASICally disrespected

From a financial point of view, BASIC programmers usually earn less than C programmers, even if they're doing the exact same job. Part of the reason for this is that BASIC suffers from the perception that it's a toy language — unsuitable for commercial use. Although that was true at one time, the BASIC language has evolved to the point where it can do practically anything C or other languages can do.

Although you can use BASIC to create anything from satellite navigation systems to Wall Street financial trading programs, BASIC programmers will probably always get paid less, so you'll need to know another language like C anyway, just to get paid more. Because BASIC programmers tend to get paid less than other programmers, many programmers feel that they might as well skip BASIC and just figure out C instead.

C, it's kinda hard

There's nothing wrong with studying C as your first programming language. The biggest problem with C is that it's not an intuitive language for beginners to learn and understand. With its cryptic syntax and odd use of symbols in place of actual words, understanding C means trying to figure out how to program while also wrestling with trying to figure out C, which essentially doubles the effort needed to know how to program a computer.

As a result, many beginners get frustrated with C as their first programming language and wind up more confused than ever. Imagine how many people would want to drive a car if it meant knowing how to refine their own gasoline and build their own engine. Understanding C isn't quite as difficult as refining gasoline or building a combustion engine, but it can seem that way, especially when you're programming for the first time and you start with the C language.

So if you're going to begin programming, you should definitely understand C eventually, but not necessarily as a first language. You don't need to know BASIC, but BASIC can definitely help you understand how programming works. If you figure out BASIC first and then figure out C, you'll know two of the most popular languages on the planet.

The more programming languages you know, the better you can understand the benefits and drawbacks of all programming languages, including favorites like BASIC and C. Ultimately, the best programming language to discover first is the language that makes programming easiest and fun for you, whether that language is as simple as BASIC, as arcane as assembly language, or as obscure as SNOBOL.

To help you understand the goals of different programming languages and the methods they use to achieve these goals, consider the different categories of programming languages.

Back in 1963, programming was difficult because you had to know how the computer worked before you could write a program. As a result, only scientists, engineers, and mathematicians tended to program a computer.

Programming back in the early days of computers meant typing commands on a series of punch cards and feeding the punch cards into the computer. Then you had to return an hour later (or sometimes even overnight) to see the results of your program. If you made just one mistake, your program wouldn't run. Then you'd have to correct that one mistake and try to run your program again. If the computer found a second mistake, it wouldn't run the program either, and you'd have to try again. Needless to say, programming like this was tedious, slow, and frustrating.

At Dartmouth University, two professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, decided that non-scientists could also benefit from computer programming by writing programs for themselves. (Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians tended only to write programs for themselves too, but how many ordinary people could use a program that would calculate a quadratic equation?)

Principles

Because programming was so difficult, both John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz decided to create a new programming language specifically designed to teach novices how to program. The goals of their new programming language, dubbed BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), consists of several principles:

Descriptive commands

To make the language easy to understand, BASIC uses descriptive commands, which is something most programming languages don't use. For example, this assembly language program prints the words Hello, world! on-screen:

title   Hello World Program
dosseg
.model small
.stack 100h

.data
hello_message db 'Hello, world!',0dh,0ah,'$'

.code
main  proc
      mov    ax,@data
      mov    ds,ax

      mov    ah,9
      mov    dx,offset hello_message
      int    21h

      mov    ax,4C00h
      int    21h
main  endp
end   main

Looking at the preceding assembly language program, isn't what the preceding commands are telling the computer simple and intuitive? (If you answered, "Yes," you're either a computer genius or completely delusional.)

Now look at the command you need to use to print Hello, world! in BASIC:

PRINT "Hello, world!"

That's it — a single line. To print Hello, world! on-screen, you can either write a 17-line assembly language program (and risk making a mistake on all 17 different lines), or you can write a one-line BASIC program that's immediately obvious and intuitive.

Versatility

Both professors Kemeny and Kurtz didn't just want to create a programming language that was easy to understand, but they also wanted to create a programming language that could be put to practical use as well. That way, novices could understand BASIC and then use BASIC to write actual programs. After all, there's no point in using BASIC to teach programming only to force programmers to later use a completely different language if they wanted to write a useful program.

So BASIC not only provides descriptive commands like PRINT, but it also provides enough commands so you can write practically any type of program. The only type of program you can't create easily in BASIC are programs that require you to understand and access the actual hardware of the computer or operating systems.

Shielding you from having to know the technical details of the computer hardware or operating system is actually another goal of BASIC. By using BASIC, you can focus on solving a problem and not get distracted by the technical details of the computer.

Another goal of BASIC is to provide the programmer with instant feedback. Most programming languages force you to write an entire program before you can run it. BASIC, on the other hand, was originally designed to let you type in a single BASIC command at a time, and the computer tells you right away whether the command works.

Such instant feedback made BASIC programming much easier and faster than traditional programming languages. In addition, such rapid feedback helped novices quickly figure out what they were doing wrong so they could correct their mistakes right away.

BASIC introduced the idea of giving programmers instant feedback every time they typed in another BASIC command. If you typed in the following BASIC command:

PRINT 2+4

The BASIC interpreter would display the following on-screen:

6

Although giving programmers instant feedback made figuring out programming easier, a computer scientist named Seymour Papert felt that programming should be accessible to everyone, including children. Because few children are excited about adding 2+4 together and seeing the number 6 appear, Seymour Papert thought that a better form of instant feedback for children would involve seeing the results of your program visually.

So in 1967, Seymour invented a new programming language — Logo — which was designed especially for teaching children. The main idea behind Logo is that rather than create a program to solve abstract problems, like mathematical equations, Logo shows children how to draw pictures on-screen.

With Logo, you give commands to an imaginary robot commonly called a turtle. To write a program (and draw pictures), you have to give the "turtle" commands that tell it which way to move, when to start drawing pictures (known as turtle graphics), and when to move without drawing pictures. The following Logo program tells the turtle to draw a square, as shown in Figure 3-1.

PENDOWN
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90

Figure I.3-1. Programming in Logo means giving commands to a "turtle" and telling it where to move to draw pictures.

By drawing pictures in Logo, even novice programmers could pick up the principles of programming without even realizing it. Logo has succeeded as an educational tool for both teaching programming and teaching students how to think logically and solve problems. Logo has proven popular for graphics, animation, music, mathematics, and even robotics.

Unlike BASIC though, Logo has remained primarily an educational tool with few programmers using Logo to develop commercial applications. As a result, you're hard pressed to find jobs available for Logo programmers; so Logo is a great language to find out a different way to program a computer, but it's not likely to translate into marketable programming skills any time in the near future. If you study Logo just to explore new ways of thinking, you won't be disappointed.

Unlike BASIC or Logo, which was designed to make programming interactive and fun, Pascal was designed to force programmers to design and organize a program using structured programming techniques (see Book I, Chapter 2).

Early versions of BASIC made it easy to write spaghetti programs because a BASIC program consisted essentially of one glob of commands lumped together inside a single file. The larger your BASIC program got, the more confusing it became to read and understand.

Pascal tackled this problem by encouraging programmers to divide a large program into smaller subprograms. Each subprogram would solve a single problem and act like a Lego building block. Slap enough subprograms together and you could create a much larger and more complicated program.

Although Pascal was initially designed to teach good programming habits, Pascal eventually became popular for writing many commercial programs. Early versions of the Macintosh operating system were even written in Pascal. Computer scientists eventually added so many features to Pascal that Pascal's power could nearly rival that of the C language.

Pascal's greatest strength was that it was almost as easy to understand as BASIC and almost as fast, efficient, and powerful as C. Reading a Pascal program was much easier than reading a similar C program, as the following programs demonstrate.

Program Hello_World;

Begin
  Writeln ('Hello World!'),
End.

Without even knowing much about programming, you can figure out what the preceding Pascal program does, just because Pascal commands consist of descriptive words. Now take a look at the equivalent C program, which is fairly easy to understand, but littered with cryptic characters and symbols:

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
  printf ("Hello World!
");
}

Although Pascal combined the best features from BASIC and C, Pascal's popularity also plummeted because of these similarities, too.

BASIC started adopting structured programming techniques, which made BASIC easier to understand than Pascal but just as easy to write organized programs like Pascal. On the other extreme, C started adopting similar structured programming techniques as well, so you had the power of C with nearly all the advantages of structured programming emphasized by Pascal. Given a choice between using Pascal, which was almost as easy to use as BASIC and almost as powerful as C, or using BASIC (which was easier to figure out than Pascal) or C (which was more powerful than Pascal), programmers found few reasons to use Pascal any more.

Despite Pascal's fading popularity, you can still understand Pascal as a first language and then find a job writing and modifying Pascal programs. However, Pascal programmers aren't in as much demand as C programmers, so study Pascal to better understand good programming principles and then apply those skills to writing programs in other languages.

Although BASIC, Logo, and Pascal may be the more popular teaching languages available, plenty of other people have created their own languages to teach people how to program a computer. Because these languages are developed by individuals or companies, they're proprietary languages — a single company or individual controls the language. (In comparison, languages like BASIC, Logo, and Pascal all have official "standards," although most companies that offer BASIC, Logo, or Pascal compilers often deviate from the official "standard" anyway.)

The main disadvantage of proprietary languages is that you probably won't find much work writing programs in any little-known, proprietary language. The advantage of proprietary languages is that they can often be much better at solving specific types of problems. In this case, proprietary teaching languages can make understanding programming much easier and more exciting than BASIC, Logo, or Pascal.

KPL (Kid's Programming Language)

One of the newest proprietary teaching languages is KPL (Kid's Programming Language), which you can download for free from www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com. The idea behind KPL is that kids like playing video games, so why not create a programming language that can teach kids how to program their own video games?

Creating video games in languages like BASIC, Logo, or Pascal is difficult, but creating video games in KPL is easy, as shown in Figure 3-2. In the process of creating real video games that they can play, kids also learn to read, type, do math, and understand the principles of computer programming.

Figure I.3-2. KPL teaches kids how to program by letting them create their own video games.

If the idea of using a "kid's" programming language to figure out programming bothers you, grab a copy of KPL's more sophisticated version, Phrogram (www.phrogram.com). Like KPL, Phrogram is free. (If you want to compile your video games into programs that you can give or sell to others, buy the commercial version of Phrogram.)

Both KPL and Phrogram use a proprietary language that combines the readability of Pascal with the object-oriented features of more advanced languages, as shown in the following example:

Program HelloWorld
    Method Main()
        PrintLine ("Hello, World!")
    End Method
End Program

The goal of KPL and Phrogram is to make programming simple, easy, and fun by focusing on graphics, sound, and animation so you can create video games. After you know how to program with KPL or Phrogram, you can migrate to more popular languages later.

Alice

The latest programming technique for creating, organizing, and maintaining large programs is object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, figuring out object-oriented programming can be difficult, especially for beginners who already have enough trouble just figuring out how to program a computer.

So to help beginners understand object-oriented programming, Carnegie Mellon University has created a free programming language dubbed Alice (www.alice.org). To make programming fun and teach object-oriented principles at the same time, Alice lets beginners write simple programs to animate characters on the screen, as shown in Figure 3-3.

When you write an Alice program, your commands create an animated character on-screen. Then you need to write additional commands to tell that animated character how to move to create a simple story. In the process of telling the animated character how to move, you wind up discovering both how to program and how to use object-oriented principles while having fun in the process.

Like most teaching programming languages, Alice programming uses plain English commands, like move forward or play sound. By using simple commands, Alice lets you focus on understanding the principles of object-oriented programming without getting bogged down in understanding the peculiar syntax of a specific programming language.

Figure I.3-3. An Alice program creates an animated character on-screen and moves it around.

Lego Mindstorms

Kids love building things with Lego building bricks, so to encourage kids to build actual working robots, Lego has released their Lego robot-building kit, Mindstorms NXT. Not only can you build a working robot with Lego bricks, but you can also program it using the Lego NXT-G programming language.

To write a program in NXT-G, you don't have to type a thing. Instead, you create a program by arranging icons that represent different type of actions your robot can do, such as move forward or respond to a light. After writing your program on your computer, you load that program into your Lego robot and watch it go.

By using Lego Mindstorms NXT, anyone can figure out both programming skills and robot-making skills. Unlike KPL, Logo, or Alice, Lego Mindstorms NXT lets you see your working program in action as a walking, rolling, or crawling Lego robot.

Programming a killer robot

Studying how to program by controlling a Lego robot can be fun, but to combine the thrill of controlling a robot with the joy of playing a video game, computer scientists have also created games that let you write a simple program for controlling a battling robot, as shown in Figure 3-4.

Figure I.3-4. Using a battle robot to study programming can make programming more exciting.

Instead of writing a program just to control a robot, these games force you to write a program to move a robot on-screen, search for other robots nearby, and then attack those other robots with a cannon.

After you finish your program, you can see the results by watching your robot battle another robot in a gladiator-style battle. Write a "good" program, and your robot can defeat another robot. Write a "bad" program, and your robot gets blasted into chunks of (virtual) charred metal.

To program a "battling robot," use a simplified version of a popular programming language, such as Java or C++. That way you not only figure out the basics of a popular programming language, but you can also start writing "real" programs that actually do something interesting right from the start. Table 3-1 lists some popular "battling robot" programming games.

The C language is a curious combination of assembly language and high-level languages, like BASIC. Like assembly language, C provides commands for directly manipulating every part of the computer, including memory, hard disks, and printers. Like a high-level language, C lets you focus on the logic of your program without worrying about the technical details of the computer so you get the best of both assembly language and high-level languages.

Because C programs are nearly (note the emphasis on the word "nearly") as easy to write and understand as high-level languages but still give you the power of accessing the computer's hardware like assembly language, C is often used for creating large, complicated programs (such as operating systems and word processors) along with more exotic programs (like antivirus utilities or disk diagnostic programs).

A C compiler tends to create smaller, faster, more efficient programs than compilers for other programming languages. The reason is that the C language is much simpler and thus easier to translate into equivalent machine language commands.

What makes the C language simpler is its small number of commands or keywords. Keywords are special commands used in every programming language. The more keywords a programming language uses, the fewer commands you need to make the computer do something. The fewer keywords a programming language offers, the more commands you need to make the computer do something.

A programming language with a lot of keywords means you can write a program with fewer commands. That's great from the programmer's point of view, but inefficient from the computer's point of view.

The more keywords used in a language, the more work the compiler needs to do to translate all these keywords into machine language. As a result, programs written in languages that use a lot of keywords tend to run much slower than programs written in C.

A C program compiles to smaller, more efficient machine language commands because instead of offering a large number of keywords, the C language offers just a handful of keywords. This makes it easy for a compiler to translate the limited number of keywords into machine language.

However, as a programmer, you need to use C's limited number of keywords to create subprograms that mimic the built-in commands of other programming languages. Because this can be impractical, the C language often includes libraries of subprograms that mimic the built-in commands of other programming languages.

The bottom line is that C programs tend to run faster and more efficiently than equivalent programs written in other programming languages. So if you need speed, efficiency, and access to the computer hardware, the C language is the most popular choice.

By using much fewer commands than most programming languages, the C language makes it easy to create compilers that can translate a C program into machine language. Because it's so easy to create C compilers, compared to creating compilers for other programming languages, you can find a C compiler for nearly every computer and operating system.

Theoretically, this means it's possible to take a C program, written on Windows, copy it to another computer and operating system, and run that program on a different operating system, like Linux or Mac OS X, with little or no modifications. When you can copy and run a program on multiple computers and operating systems, the program (and the language it's written in) is portable.

So not only does C create small, fast, and efficient programs, but C also allows you to copy and run your program on different operating systems and computers. Given all these advantages, the C language has few equivalent rivals.

Although the C programming language is popular, it's not perfect. When object-oriented programming became popular for designing and maintaining large programs, computer scientists created an object-oriented version of C called C++.

Because more people are writing and organizing large programs with object-oriented programming, more programs are being written in C++. Some people study C so they can understand the peculiarities of the C language. When they feel comfortable with C, they start studying C++ and object-oriented programming.

Other people just skip C and start studying C++ right away. The theory is that as a professional programmer, you'll probably wind up writing and modifying C++ programs anyway, so you might as well study C++ from the start. After you know C++, you pretty much know enough to teach yourself how to write and modify C programs, too.

Although C and C++ programs are supposed to be portable — you can copy and run them on other computers — they're not really. Sometimes, you have to make minor changes to get a C/C++ program to run on another computer, but more often, you have to make major changes.

So that's why Sun Microsystems created the Java programming language. Like C++, Java is also based on the C language, but includes several features to make Java programs safer than C or C++ programs. Specifically, Java isolates the programmer from directly accessing the computer's memory. This reduces the power of Java somewhat, but translates into safer programs that (hopefully) won't crash as often as C/C++ programs do.

Perhaps the most important feature of Java is its portability. Rather than attempt to compile a Java program into machine language for different types of processors, Java compiles Java programs into an intermediate file format called bytecode or pseudocode (also called p-code).

To run a Java program that's compiled into bytecode, you need a free program, or a Java virtual machine (VM). As long as a computer has a Java VM, it can run a Java compiled bytecode program.

Besides creating full-fledged programs, like word processors or spreadsheets, Java can also create smaller programs, or applets, which can be used to create interactive Web pages.

So if you're looking for a programming language that makes programming safer and more portable, consider Java. Java programmers are in demand almost as much as C/C++ programmers, and the similarities between Java and C/C++ make it relatively easy to understand after you know C. (Or you can study Java first and then study C/C++ later.)

Microsoft took one look at C/C++ and decided they could create an improved language, which they dubbed C# (pronounced C-sharp).

C# advantages

C# has a couple advantages over languages such as C, C++, and even Java.

Object oriented

One main advantage of C# over C++ is that C# is a true object-oriented programming language, so you have to use object-oriented programming to write a program in C#.

Forcing you to use only object-oriented programming techniques might seem like a drawback until you realize that C++ is a hybrid language that lets you choose whether to use object-oriented programming. Although C++ gives you, the programmer, more flexibility, C++ programs can also be a mish-mash of structured programming mingled in with object-oriented programming.

Trying to decipher such a mix of programming techniques can be confusing. By forcing all programmers to use object-oriented programming (and isolate their structured programming techniques only inside objects), C# programs can be much easier to understand and modify.

Type safe

A second advantage of C# is type-safe language. Basically, if a C# program stores data, such as a whole number (such as 3 or 49, but not 5.48), the C# compiler checks to make sure no other part of the program accidentally changes that whole number into a decimal.

With languages that aren't type-safe, the compiler lets a program change data types, such as storing a decimal or negative number where the program expects a whole number. Obviously, if your program is expecting a whole number but instead receives a decimal number, the program may get confused and crash.

.NET compatibility

Because Microsoft invented C#, they also invented a special program — the .NET framework. The idea behind the .NET framework is that instead of compiling a C# program into machine language, you compile a C# program into p-code, which is similar to the bytecode intermediate file format of Java.

The .NET framework allows you to both

By letting you write a program with different languages, the .NET framework lets you use each language's strengths without being forced to put up with that language's weaknesses.

A final advantage of the .NET framework is that it lets you use event-driven programming to create your user interface and then write event handlers in any .NET language, such as C#.

Figure I.3-5. The .NET framework can tie programs, written in multiple languages, into a single program.

Because C# is similar to C, C++, and Java, you can study C# first and then study the other languages (or vice versa). The main drawback with C# is that you can only use C# to write Windows programs. If you want to write programs for Linux, Mac OS X, or other operating systems, you can't use C#.

For that reason, many programmers prefer to first understand C or C++, and then understand C#. If you don't mind being limited to writing only Windows programs, go ahead and study C#.

If you plan to write programs professionally, you'll probably need to know a curly bracket language. If you know C, C++, Java, or C#, you can pick up any of the other curly bracket languages fairly easily:

If you want to write programs that can run on different computers, use Java:

The C# language is quickly becoming the standard language for writing Windows programs, so if that's what you want to do, figuring out C# is your best bet. As long as you know at least one curly bracket language, you know one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

At the simplest level, scripting languages (also called macro languages) can automate repetitive tasks that essentially record your keystrokes so you can play them back at a later time. For example, if you regularly type the term Campylobacteriosis (a disease caused by the Campylobacter bacteria), you have two choices:

Figure 3-6 shows a scripting language, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), that's captured keystrokes and saved them in a VBA scripting language program.

Figure I.3-6. Recording keystrokes automatically creates the equivalent VBA code in Microsoft Word.

Besides letting you automate a program, scripting languages also let you customize a program, which can make the program easier. For example, you might have a spreadsheet that calculates your company's invoices. However, to use this spreadsheet, you need to know the specific place in the spreadsheet to type new invoice information. Type this information in the wrong place, and the spreadsheet doesn't work right.

To avoid this problem, you can write a program in a scripting language that can display a window with boxes to type in new invoice information. Then the scripting language program automatically plugs that new information in the correct place in the spreadsheet every time.

For even more power, a scripting language can combine automation with customization to make programs perform tasks on their own. If you use the Mac OS X operating system, you can use its built-in scripting language — AppleScript — to control your Macintosh.

For example, you can write an AppleScript program that tells your computer to download files over the Internet at a specific time each day, move files from one folder to another while renaming those files in the process, or retrieve waiting e-mail messages and sort them into categories. Figure 3-7 shows an AppleScript program that can retrieve stock quotes off the Internet.

Figure I.3-7. AppleScript lets you customize and automate the Mac OS X operating system.

Built-in scripting languages can help you automate or customize a program, but what if you use a program that doesn't include a scripting language? Or what if you need to transfer data between two or more programs, but neither program uses the same scripting language? In these cases, you'll need to use a scripting language that isn't tied to any particular program, such as Perl, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript.

When scripting languages link two or more programs together, the scripting language programs are often referred to as glue. So if you have a Web page that lets users type in their names, addresses, and credit card numbers, and a database program that stores customer information, you could use a scripting program to glue the Web page to the database. The user would type information into the Web page, and the scripting language would then yank this data off the Web page and shove it into the database.

By gluing programs together, scripting languages let you combine existing programs to create custom applications. Because scripting languages are interpreted rather than compiled, they can run on any computer with the proper language interpreter. So whether you use Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, you can still use the same scripting language (and programs) on different computers.

Because scripting languages are so easy to understand and use, some scripting languages can create standalone programs. One of the most popular scripting languages used for developing standalone programs is Visual Basic.

Unlike scripting languages, like Perl or Python, which link separate programs together, Visual Basic links program components together. To create a Visual Basic program, you design the program's user interface consisting of pull-down menus, buttons, and check boxes. Then you write Visual Basic commands to link all these separate user interface components together to create a working program.

One of the earliest database programming languages for personal computers was dBASE. By using the dBASE language, you could create a user interface, write commands for storing data, and write additional commands for retrieving and manipulating that data.

The following dBASE code creates a simple menu and waits for the user to type in a choice by choosing a number from 1-6.

SET TALK OFF
USE CUSTOMER.DAT

STORE 0 TO choice
STORE " No. Name    Title   Address" TO head
DO WHILE choice <> 6
ERASE

@ 3,1 SAY "
   ======================================================"
@ 4,26 SAY "Main Menu"

@ 5,1 SAY "
   ======================================================"
@ 8,26 SAY "1) Display Customer File"
@ 10,26 SAY "2) Display Record"
@ 12,26 SAY "3) Input Record"
@ 14,26 SAY "4) Delete Record"
@ 16,26 SAY "5) Print Customer File"
@ 18,26 SAY "6) Exit"
STORE 0 TO choice

Although the dBASE code may initially look cryptic, you can see how the dBASE language works like traditional programming languages. The SAY command simply prints information on-screen much like the BASIC PRINT command or the C printf command.

Early versions of the dBASE language were interpreted but later versions were compiled, allowing programmers to write complete database programs and sell them to others. The main difference between dBASE and languages such as C++ is that traditional programming languages can be used to create anything whereas dBASE is meant just for creating programs that need to store and retrieve data.

Because so many businesses needed programs that manipulated data (hotel reservations, hospital patient tracking, inventory management, and so on), programmers often had to teach themselves a database programming language, such as dBASE, rather than use their favorite programming languages, like C++ or BASIC.

To let programmers continue using their favorite (and familiar) programming languages, many companies started adding database access to their language compilers. Two popular languages that offer database access features include Microsoft's Visual Basic and Borland's Delphi (based on the Pascal programming language).

By adding database features to a familiar language, programmers could continue using their favorite programming language without having to know a completely different database programming language. In addition, programmers could use their favorite language to add more sophisticated features that might be impossible for a database programming language to create, such as the ability to display animation.

Perhaps the simplest way to create database applications is to use a database program that includes its own scripting language. By writing simple programs (scripts), you can glue the different parts of your database together, such as a script that transfers data from a database file to a user interface.

One of the most popular Windows database programs, Microsoft Access, offers the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripting language. Of course, Microsoft Access runs only on the Windows operating system, so if you need to create database applications that run on both Windows and Mac OS X, you can choose FileMaker (www.filemaker.com).

Like Microsoft Access, FileMaker offers a scripting language: ScriptMaker. Best of all, you can create standalone versions of your FileMaker databases and sell them to anyone who uses Windows or Mac OS X.