Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment

Lessons learned from implementing DOPE were subsequently applied to the invention and development of BASIC.

[1] Each statement was designed to correspond to a flowchart operation and consisted of a numeric line number, an operation, and the required operands: The final variable specified the destination for the computation.

As with Fortran, different letters represented different variable types.

[2] Kemeny collaborated with high school student Sidney Marshall (taking freshman calculus) to develop the language.

The language had a number of other features and innovations that were carried over into BASIC: *Unlike either Fortran or Algol 60.