A BASIC loader is a computer programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 technique used with the BASIC

BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

 programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 to POKE

Poke

Poke most commonly refers to the action of tapping and/or softly jabbing an object or person using a finger, stick, or similar object etc.Poke, Poké or POKE may also refer to:*PEEK and POKE, BASIC programming language commands...

 machine language opcodes into RAM

Ram

-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...

. The technique was most prevalent in type-in program

Type-in program

A type-in program, or just type-in, is a computer program listing printed in a computer magazine or book, meant to be typed in by the reader in order to run the program on a computer....

 listings published for home computer

Home computer

Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...

s of the 1980s as it allowed the publication of programs that gained the benefits of fast-executing assembly language

Assembly language

An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...

 without requiring the user to own or know how to operate an assembler

Assembler

Assembler may refer to:* Assembler , for an assembly language, a computer program to translate between lower-level representations of computer programs...

 or machine language monitor program.

The programs most often took the form of a short "stub" loader followed by a (sometimes lengthy) series of DATA statements that contained the core program logic as decimal opcodes. The loader mainly consisted of a For loop

For loop

In computer science a for loop is a programming language statement which allows code to be repeatedly executed. A for loop is classified as an iteration statement....

 that enumerated the DATA statements and POKEd them into memory. Sometimes the DATA statements were in hexadecimal

Hexadecimal

In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal is a positional numeral system with a radix, or base, of 16. It uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols 0–9 to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen...

, in which case the loader would contain code to translate from hex to the decimal numbers demanded by the POKE command.