Some BASIC Background

Many hard- core programmers scoff at the idea of programming in BASIC. The name itself (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) suggests that it's not a professional language. In fact, BASIC was first developed in the early 1960s as a way to teach programming techniques to college students. BASIC caught on quickly and is available in hundreds of dialects for many types of computers.

BASIC has evolved and improved over the years . For example, in many early implementations , BASIC was an interpreted language. Each line was interpreted before it was executed, causing slow performance. Most modern dialects of BASIC allow the code to be compiled - converted to machine code - which results in faster and more efficient execution

BASIC gained quite a bit of respectability in 1991 when Microsoft released Visual Basic for Windows. This product made it easy for the masses to develop standalone applications for Windows. Visual Basic has very little in common with early versions of BASIC, but Visual Basic is the foundation on which VBA was built.