The reason? Pure nostalgia.
Anyway, there was a standard for Basic that was published in the late 80s or early 90s. It was probably ISO/IEC 10279:1991, but I don’t have access to that and cannot be sure.
Whatever this standard was, some of the syntax made its way into Borlands Turbo Basic and Microsofts Visual Basic. I never learned any significant amount of VB, but Turbo Basic is one of those things I played with in my mis-spent youth.
At one time, my main reference was an article published in one of the main computing periodicals – maybe Personal Computer World, maybe Byte.
A scan of that article (if anyone can even identify it) would be great, but all I really want is a few pages quick reference of that standard syntax. Must be free (I’m not that nostalgic), but it must describe the standard syntax – the whole point is to sort out what is standard as opposed to VB or whatever.
EDIT The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that this standard was available around 1987 or 1988. Maybe it was the earlier non-full version of the standard above, or maybe it was pre-acceptance of the standard.
The ANSI standardization process was underway in the mid-80’s and Kemeny & Kurtz (the original inventors of BASIC) founded “True Basic” to market a standard BASIC to the PC market. Around this same time the 8th edition of BASIC on DTSS was renamed “Dartmouth Standard Basic”, to emphasize its standard compliance.
True Basic hewed pretty closely to the ANSI standard, but I haven’t been able to find a copy for their reference manual online. This list of TB functions and commands may give you some idea though.