from the April 1986 issue of PCM By Richard A. White An important question these days is what is BASIC’s place in the world of microcomputing? Over the past few years the IBM PC and its compatibles have arrived, followed by a vast outpouring of software of every description. Each machine comes with a BASIC language interpreter on its DOS disk. It is likely that only a small percentage of these interpreters have been loaded for the purpose of doing programming.