[jerf]

I remember the minor shock I experienced when writing programs without line numbers. I recall a couple of "good at programming whiz kids" never could make the transition and dropped the compsci major.

I escaped the "permanent brain damage" that Dijkstra complained about that era of BASIC producing, but I understand where he's coming from now and don't begrudge him the slight hyperbole. It was a language where there were so many accidental complexities that there was virtually no prayer of someone penetrating through to the essential issues, using Fred Brook's definitions of accidental/essential. You're not learning anything useful while you're manually renumbering lines because you used up everything between 15-20 and fixing up the GOTOs. (I never had anything with RENUM support.)