[tralarpa]

I did my first serious programming steps with BASIC on the C64 and the Amiga.

The (actually second) BASIC interpreter on the Amiga was made by Microsoft. It was great and horrible at the same time. Great because it had while-loops, labels instead of line numbers, and basic (no pun intended) support for the Amiga GUI, i.e you could open windows and create menus. Horrible because it was super slow and, for some reasons unknown to me, Microsoft had decided to not implement stack frames for subroutines. So, all local variables in subroutines were static and recursions were not allowed.

The weird thing: You still had to write the "STATIC" keyword although all subroutines were static anyway! (I assume the STATIC keyword was optional in the other Microsoft BASIC version and non-static subroutines were supported there)