[andyjohnson0]

Before getting my hands on a BBC Micro I'd done all my teenage programming on an Apple II - so the killer feature of BBC Basic for me was that it had a renumber command. No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120. A little thing but it felt like magic.

[mrlonglong]

I absolutely hated line numbers. In my current paid job I'm paid to develop Visual Basic applications, not a single line number in sight. Basic has certainly come a long way since the 80s.

[tabtab]

The nice thing about line numbers is that you didn't have to learn a different code editor for different computer brands. I could walk up to any computer that had BASIC in a department store, and program up my favorite childish prank on every brand:

         10 PRINT "This computer is overheated."
         20 PRINT "WARNING: Computer about to EXPLODE!..."
         30 GO TO 10
         RUN

Newbies walking up saw the active screen, got wide-eyed and walked away quickly. One even called security, as I watched from a distance. Good times!

[pjmlp]

Structured Basic was already a thing in the 80's, see VMS Basic, or Turbo Basic.

[mrlonglong]

Yes, VMS Basic will be ported to the OpenVMS platform on amd64 fairly soon and will be available next year. I'm one of the lucky few testing OpenVMS on amd64.

[pjmlp]

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

[zozbot234]

> No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120.

Line numbers are arbitrary, you can just use GOTO to jump to some out-of-line code then GOTO back at the end. It gets a bit spaghetti'ish if you do it lot, though.

[andyjohnson0]

Even back in ~1985 I'd have felt bad about such a practice. And I had only the very vaguest notions about "structured programming".

The school I went to only had a cpuple of computers, so I wrote code longhand on A4 lined paper. When I needed to insert lines, I wrote them on a slip of paper that I placed at the appropriate place on the page and stapled on the right-hand edge.

We've certainly come a long way.

[bee_rider]

Dijkstra ruined programming. >:(

[codeulike]

Desperate times