BASIC, or Beginners All Purpose Instruction Code (there you go Joe :), was designed to allow computers to be easily programmable by kids (my 1st program at age nine) or 'non-programmers', to explore the power of computers (then pretty new at the time 1963-64?). It's english (as opposed to martian) syntax is why it ended up in most early home PC's, with a very small percentage of others including stuff like Pascal, ForTran or forth(ughh) etc.

I do not believe we are making a fair comparison here, for C is not really 'high level' but in fact more like an 'intermediate' language i.e. closer to an assembler, designed to be useable on a wide wariety of hardware platforms. Iooking at (advanced) string or numeric processing routines however, I find it difficult to see this as a 'feature'...

But as Jez correctly stated (my opinion), if you want to see the outcome of Simple Math Models or write simple text-based games, then BASIC is very manageable, but more complex programs can be challenging (someone may prove me wrong here, but I've written too many BASIC programs to know i'm right). On the other hand, if you write fairly complex applications that are intended to work cross-platform (like I do at work for the MSP430) then you may have to 'go with the crowd' and use 'C'.

After all, what else is there?

Valentin