truebasic
A legitimate, direct descendent of the original Dartmouth BASIC, also created by Kemeny and Kurtz in 1984, should become a cultuated reference. But reality was quite opposite. TrueBASIC has never been so popular as it was criticized. Anyways, as of 2023 it remains active as a commercial product in three differently priced bundles for Windows, something that shows it acquired a loyal users community.
! instead of the more used apostrophe.TrueBASIC has a significant number of extension modules sold at its website, each bringing a new set of statements and functions.
Somehow strangely, TrueBASIC was harshly received. BYTE's "Computing at Chaos Manor" columnist Jerry Pournelle was acid in the September 1985 edition 1). He tried to run a simple 4-line program with numbered lines and could not get past an "Illegal line number" error. He also criticized TrueBASIC's environment unusual interface. "I got tired of fighting with TrueBASIC's 'features' after a ouple of hours", he said. "It's funny that so few of us microcomputer users understand how badly we need help or how ugly our BASIC has become. Now we have the Word. Kemeny and Kurtz have called for a 'rebirth known as TrueBASIC' ".
John C. Dvorak said in his "Inside Track" column at InfoWorld in November 19842) that Kemeny and Kurz "reinvented Pascal, and they've given it the awkward moniker True BASIC" with the intention of making money on the ANSI BASIC standards from an "ivory tower".